Free Narration by Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Liesl M. Olson

when you are just talking has no feeling that they are any audience then are they an audience and quite rightly you do not cannot must not shall not write as you talk, which of course you do not even when you say you do which anybody does say they do only of course not of course it is not true.
     
    When you write this is of course recognition there is the recognition that you recognize what you write as you write, while as you talk there is of course some recognition but really is there any real recognition recognition of whatyou talk as you talk. I myself think not, and therefore naturally not you do not write as you talk, because as you write you recognize what you write as you write and as you talk you do not recognize what you talk as you talk. There really is no real reason why you should since after all you are not your audience as you talk nobody really is not really as anybody talks that is just talks.
     
    I knew I would have to do something else before I could begin to tell anything I know anything about history and now I know what it is I must know something about conversation and this is what I do know about conversation that is about talking.
     
    You can see how difficult the writing of history is, I think anybody can see from this that is because conversation that is talking is what it is newspapers are what they are, mystery stories are what they are and anybody is what they are and anything that is anywhere where anybody is is what it is. You can see it is difficult very difficult that history can ever come to be literature. But it would be so very interesting if it could be so very interesting. Anybody can see that there is more confusion that is to say perhaps not more confusion but that it is a more difficult thing to write history to make it anything than to make anything that is anything be anything because in history you have everything, you have the newspapers and the conversations and letter writing and the mystery stories and audiences and in every direction an audience that fits anything in every other way in which any audience can fit itself to be anything, and there is of course as I have been saying so much to trouble anyone about anyone of any of these things.
     
    And now before anything else to continue that is to begin that is to go on about letter writing. Letter writing is a very interesting part of audiencewriting. When you are young you write about yourself inside or what you are doing or you write a letter of overwhelming that is a love letter or a mixture of this thing and in all this writing the audience is in a state of diffusion, and the letter is as it is as any of you may know, that is to say you write as if anybody was hearing only you have the vagueness of knowing that no one is hearing, the question of listening does not yet come in.
     
    Adult letter writing is directed to some one even if the same thing is said as is said to anyone any other one to whom you are then that is at that time writing but nevertheless it is directed to some one and the audience is not a diffused one but it is a distant one and how does that effect letter writing, well you know something about this thing and it really is the only time in writing when the outside and the inside flow together without interrupting, not generally with much concentrating, but still at any rate with not much interrupting. It is the one time when writing for an outside does not make the inside outside or the outside inside it is a diffusion but not a confusing, it is really a kind of an imitation of marrying of two being one, and yet being two and presumably two as much as anything. There can be a whole description of this thing but this is enough with which to begin.
     
    And now before once more talking about something leading up to history let us finish with the subject of lecturing. Now in lecturing as in acting you introduce something else the physical the actual physical presence that connects the audience to the one