Stephenson's idea--generate high-quality stuff on the first run by cultivating your subconscious to spew only high-quality stuff--reminds me of performing impro

Stephenson's idea--generate high-quality stuff on the first run by cultivating your subconscious to spew only high-quality stuff--reminds me of performing improv. An improv scene is anything from a skit to an entire musical, performed without a script or planning. The players get on stage and just do it, by saying, acting out, and/or singing the first thing that comes to mind, one line at a time. There is plenty of bad improv: amateurish stuff, "gaggy" stuff (consciously aiming for cheap laughs), etc. But I've also seen amazing improv: entire plays and musicals, sometimes with serious themes, of such coherence and high quality that it doesn't seem possible that they could have been improvised. I once saw an entire Alfred Hitchcock "movie" improvised on stage, that somehow achieved Hitchcock's signature combination of eerieness and worldly elegance. I've spent about three years training in improv, and it's actually a lot like Stephenson's tale of needing to keep the typewriter ribbon moving. Training in improv is mostly learning ways to tune into what is happening in a scene, let that trigger your spontaneous imagination, and trust that without judging it. There are some very specific techniques, like "very early in the scene, establish where you are," but mostly it's developing that skill of stoking your spontaneous imagination and taking what it gives you. You know after a while when you're tuned in and when you're not. A non-obvious but important element is to go s-l-o-w (like Stephenson with the fountain pen). That enables you to tune in. If you don't have your imagination ready to go that way, cultivated by life experience and learning as well as by a feeling for how to tune into a scene, the good stuff just ain't going to happen. My own experience with writing code is something like improv. Sometimes it sucks, and sometimes it's wonderful. There's no way the good stuff could ever have come about by continuous distillation and debugging. It had to flow. I debug very little. If code is buggy, I just throw it away and start completely from scratch. When the code is flowing, nearly all of the "thinking" is subconscious. I'm just tuning in, as if someone else is writing the code. When it's going super-well, it feels like I'm taking dictation. Just like in an improv scene, I'm writing the current line because I'm curious to know what happens next.