Since Robert Pirsig put this very well, I’ll just copy down what he said. I don’t know if this story is based on reality or not, but either way, it’s true.
He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.
—Robert M. Pirsig,Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It looks like a lot of people are of a similar mind. Judging by the comments, most people seem to be taking this merely as a way around writer's block, or a praise of depth first analysis as a way to narrow down to "a topic about which others haven't already said everything". The most insightful comment (at least to my sense of quality) proclaims this:
There is of course The Virtue of Narrowness, but what I think what Phaedrus is getting at is that people in general, not just in their writing, tend not to put much effort into thinking new thoughts and thinking for themselves. One tool he has apparently employed successfully on his students is to have them narrow the scopes of their essays, forcing them to think for themselves rather than echo back what other people had already said. But reading just this segment of the story out of context might be a little like reading one of Yudkowsky's later sequences without reading earlier ones. Allow me to supply some of that context.
The book is about Phaedrus's ongoing obsession with finding his own specific version of the nebulous "ultimate good" or "objective morality" that so many philosophers have sought after. He calls his form "quality", which is a mixture of the mechanical/analytic structure of science/rationality with the organic/emotional creativity of art/spirituality. The character is unique in the world with this particular brand of philosophy, and so does a lot of original thinking, placing little value on traditional Aristotelian thought. There are 2 types of people in the world: Aristotelians and Platonists, and he is neither.
Given this, I would suggest that Phaedrus is trying hard to think new thoughts himself, and places little value in small adaptations of existing philosophy. The character would suggest that humanity made a wrong turn in Plato's time, with the divide between passion and logic. Fixing this requires an extraordinary amount of out-of-the-box thinking. Science needs to take seriously the quest to learn where hypotheses come from, and how best to nurture passion, creativity, insight, etc and make them a real part of the scientific process. On the other hand, our culture needs to learn to appreciate beautiful engineering alongside beautiful art, and to find Joy in the Merely Real instead of mystery. These efforts call for new paradigms, new ideas, new modes of thought, and an entire upheaval of societal norms, not unlike during the enlightenment and scientific revolution.
The single concept he sees as uniting those two worlds is "Quality". Quality implies both sound engineering, and elegant, desirable form. It's at once beautiful and offers utility. It can't be defined, because to define it you would have to define every whim of an entire human mind. Even so, we all know intuitively what quality is, because we can all agree that one essay is well written or poorly written, even if we squabble about the precise letter grade it deserves. Quality isn't just what people like. The word "just" has no place in that sentence. Quality IS what people like; everything that we can appreciate, for it's design, it's elegance, it's beauty, it's ingenuity... everything.
If any of this piques your interest, I recommend reading the book itself. What I've done is rather like trying to summarize all of The Sequences in one small post. But the point is, we are not talking about a technique to get over writer's block; the author and Yudkowsky are definitely hinting at insights into the human mind. Our minds are predominately an echo chambers of everything we learn from others, but we must try and add an original thought to the mix every now and then, if we want to improve this world we live in.