Gertrude Stein was a generous coach for other writers. Everyone from Hemingway to Fitzgerald to Thornton Wilder would visit her for guidance. She would drink in their admiration and oblige with many helpful hints, like:

"You will write if you write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition."

"You have to know what you want to get; but when you know that, let it take you and if it seems to take you off the track don't hold back, because that is perhaps where instinctively you want to be and if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry..."