Stein's work on "Composition as Explanation" posits, among other things, that composition is fluid and constant, that it is a process that occurs not within the writer or artist exclusively, but in every person, every day, as images and thoughts intersect, as the world flows into the mind and the mind makes sense of the world.
Her ideas were very much in a continuum as well, influenced not only by her friends who came to her famous Paris Salon, but of the changing world around her. For Stein, environment itself was the basis for composition as we are unable to separate ourselves from the involuntary interpretation of our surrounding(s).
