The best advice I ever got in improv was: 1. Listen. 2. React. 3. Be honest. That's all you really have to do. Chögyam Trungpa put it this way: "In the experience of awareness, you do not just get hold of one chunk of mindfulness and stick with it, but you experience the mindfulness and its shadow, the environment around it. There is a tremendous appreciation of life and of how to conduct one’s life. So awareness practice is not just formal sitting practice or meditation-in-action alone. It is a unique training practice in how to behave as an inspired human being, or an inspired sentient being. That is what is meant by being an artist." -- “Art in Everyday Life,” in True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art, page 28 To me, those are two different expressions of the same core idea. First draft: give yourself permission to be honest and write. Second draft: edit. With writing, just as with improv and with living, the more we internalize a deep understanding of the rules and structures, the easier it is to just be present and mindful and write first, edit later. But...the rules are always there when we go back to editing. Sometimes it comes down to that flow thing of getting out of our own way, doesn't it? I'm nodding and jumping up and down and agreeing with you vigorously from over here, Scott(s).