Truly transcendent Tetris players blend practical and epistemic (knowledge-improving) actions fluidly, sometimes rotating descending pieces to aid identification rather than to fit them into waiting slots.

Supremely skilled Scrabble players physically shuffle their tiles, not because this is itself a way to score points, but as a way to prompt the brain with new potential word fragments—fragments that might better prompt the neural system to recall a high-scoring word.

Epistemic actions are chosen not because they are of intrinsic value to us, nor even because they move us closer, physically speaking, to some practical goal.

Instead, they may even move us temporarily further away. For example, when driving you might navigate back to a familiar spot that you know is in entirely the wrong direction, if you happen to know a reliable route from that spot to your destination.

Andy Clark, Experience Machine

My writing process is this: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with a P on this side (“Positive”) and an N on that side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”).

Where’s the needle? If it drops into the N zone, admit it. And then, instantaneously, a fix might present itself—a cut, a rearrangement, an addition. There’s not an intellectual or analytical component to this; it’s more of an impulse, one that results in a feeling of “Ah, yes, that’s better.”

And really, that’s about it.

So: a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the text, watch the needle, adjust the text (lather, rinse, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts, over months or even years. Over time, like a cruise ship slowly turning, the piece will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

Writing down is not simply leaving a record, but part of the actual process of thinking things through.

It is not as if text somehow springs fully formed from your brain. Instead, your brain acts as a constant facilitator of a stack of repeated interactions with various external resources.

As these resources (books, scribblings, etc.) are encountered, your brain reacts in a fragmentary way to each, very occasionally delivering new ideas that lead to further notes and scribbles. These are repeatedly refined, re-encountered, and transformed in what is best seen as a rolling, extended process of thinking and text construction.

In these ways, many of our prime cognitive achievements should not be credited solely to our biological brains. They depend heavily upon the enabling environments in which we act and perceive.

Andy Clark, Experience Machine

Early on, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to . . . get better. Soon, a block will start working—I can get all the way through it without a needle drop. The word that sometimes comes to mind is “undeniable.”

Once I have a few “undeniable” blocks of text, they start telling me what order they’d like to be in, and sometimes one will say that I really ought to cut it out entirely. I start asking questions like “Does E cause F or does F cause E? Which feels more natural? Which makes more sense? Which produces a more satisfying click?” Then certain blocks start to adhere (E must precede F) and I know they won’t come unstuck.

As the blocks start to fall into order, the resulting feeling of causation starts to mean something, and starts to suggest what the piece might want to be “about” (although part of this process is to shake off that feeling as much as possible and keep returning to that P/N meter, trusting that those big thematic decisions are going to be made, naturally, by way of the thousands of accreting micro-decisions at the line level).

But all of this, at every step, is more felt than decided.

Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration.

A piece written and revised in this way, like one of those seed crystals in biology class, starts out small and devoid of intention and begins to expand, organically, reacting to itself, fulfilling its own natural energy.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

Pull up on your block, then break it down: we playin Tetris

Kendrick Lamar, Humble