I will need you as players to take ownership of driving after not only your PC's own seeds, links, and goals, but also taking pains to drive after others' seeds, links, and goals, and present opportunities for each other to embody your passions, traits, and links. I will rely on you to especially practice Reincorporation (described below), and aim to be generous with Awesome Tokens for awesome reincorporations.

From the book:

This game was designed for spontaneous play. I describe this type of play as one where the players, including the GM, don’t need to spend hours preparing the game, and they don’t plan or think much about what they are going to do in the game. Instead, you prepare some basic materials that you can spontaneously use during the game to develop your story.

Here are some good techniques to use for spontaneous play.

Reincorporation
Keith Johnstone, in his book Impro (on improvisational theater), describes a concept that he calls shelving. The actors introduce a certain item or fact into the story, then “put it on the shelf” until later on, when they finally realize that they can use that item or fact again within the story. I like to call this reincorporation, to describe the whole cycle. If you’ve watched crime shows like Castle, you’ve seen this done in every episode: the details that are mentioned early on are put aside until the end of the show, when they are used to tie everything together.

Reincorporation is a powerful tool for spontaneous play. The GM or the other players put things out there spontaneously, and later during the game, you can reach back to the things you’ve established and weave them into your game.

This can happen already on a very small scale. In one of my playtests, we had a character scene during which the player described how his character salvaged a part out of a steambot. In the conflict that followed, the player used that part to make an ad-hoc gadget that he used against his opponents. He reincorporated the item, for which other players gave him plenty of gift dice from their Action Pools.

Reincorporation works on a larger scale as well. All those links on your character sheets are facts, characters, and other material that can be reincorporated later.

Related to the concept of reincorporation are seeds: those are story elements you throw out there to shelf and later tie together.

Seeds
Seeds, to me, are ideas and events that we put into the story without knowing how they’re going to turn out or what all their details are. You’re already starting the game with several seeds at your disposal: character seeds, a group seed, and setting seeds.

During play, don’t hesitate to throw new things into the mix even if you have no idea how they connect to everything or anything else. Mystery and revelations in stories don’t have to be painstakingly designed. They can just evolve organically as you play, if you’re flexible enough.

For example, when the PCs are in familiar surroundings, throw out something unusual. Maybe there’s a strange object attached to the characters’ airship. Maybe an enemy who attacks the characters has a weird tattoo. Maybe instead of paying the PCs with gold, the strange old man hands them his greatest treasure, an arcane looking piece of machinery that hasn’t worked in eons. Maybe the same NPC keeps showing up at random times to make cryptic statements.

What’s going to happen? Why is it happening? And how is all of that connected to the PCs and their story?

You don’t have to know the answer to these questions when you introduce seeds. Once they’re in the story, you can actively look for ways to tie them into what’s going on, and at some point you’ll end up with some sort of coherent picture. As coherent as any Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, or Lost plot, in any case.

Often the PC players will come up with their own explanations. Listen to them as they discuss ongoing events in their character scenes. If what they say makes sense—and it might be a lot better than what you had in mind—just go with it!

Situation Webs
One way of keeping track of what’s going on in your story, and how things are connected, is to start a situation web. You can write the various seeds and links onto a big sheet of paper and start to connect them with lines. Along the lines, you can write how they are connected. The best connections have strong impacts on one another, and one way to do that is with strong emotions, needs, and goals.

Just Play
It can be daunting to play a spontaneous game, where even the GM doesn’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a fear that it could fall flat, that nothing happens, and that nobody has fun, because the program hasn’t been developed in advance.

This fear is most common with groups who are used to putting most of the responsibility of what’s happening in the game with the GM. But remember, this game is different. If you’ve got a GM and 3 PC players, the PC players are responsible for 75% of what’s going on in the game. Their characters should be driving the story forward. They should interact with each other. They should throw out links and seeds left and right, to make sure there’s enough material to play. They should always have something in mind that their characters could do next. And with all the seeds and links you’ve got, there’s always a way to make things matter.

In the end, it’s worth it getting over the initial apprehension. Trust your spontaneity, trust the power of seeds, and most of all trust your friends who are playing with you. As long as you’re all in it together, you’re going to have fun.

How to Think about Maneuvers
I strongly encourage you to think of maneuvers this way:
Maneuvers are the default action you are assumed to take unless you state that you are either striking a foe (to cause wounds) or achieving a goal. Using strike dice or charge actions are the only way to make tangible story progress against an obstacle or enemy. Therefore Maneuvers should show us how your character uses a skill in a cool way, but that is secondary to your main duty of highlighting how the opposing challenge or foe really makes your effort difficult.

That means all maneuvers should show your character either struggling to make headway against a worthy challenge or slipping as a result of how badass the challenge is (slipping means losing ground, losing your cool, or uncovering new aspects of a challenge you weren't expecting). I will be aiming to do the same with NPC maneuvers.

The more your maneuvers cause a challenge or foe to appear and feel indomitable (to all of us in the game's audience):

• the more satisfying it will be to finally overcome the challenge or defeat the foe
• the more likely you'll get automatic awesome tokens (whether or not you get 5 successes)
• the more fun we'll all have with this game
• the more the game show fans will like your PC

The same goes with narrating the results of a failure roll: You don't have to have biffed it. Show us instead how your attempt was at least decent if not grand, but then show how and why the challenge or foe is more badass than we realized.

Expanding Players' Narrative Authority
You'll notice that this recommendation implies that you would narrate the actions of NPCs and world effects far more than you would in more standard rpgs. That is indeed expected and encouraged! We are all equally responsible to tell an awesome story, and portraying the world and your foes as significant challenges to our heroes goes a long way toward a story that's awesome rather than just meh.

For example, go ahead and describe how the bullymong you're trying to shoot rips a tin shack out of the ground and nearly succeeds at flattening you with it, even catching your shoe or butt of your rifle with the rusted sheet metal edge. Describe the alluring rival NPC appealing to your inner doubts with their wily charms. Even describe a bandit's thrown buzz saw gouging against your rib (and worse, tearing your stylish Vladof unitard).

None of these things will mean mechanical wounds, actions, or anything mechanical at all, but they are still awesome additions to the unfolding narrative of the story. You will constantly lose guns, find more, run out of bullets, get cornered in a bad spot, lose your cool, feel fear, then muster courage (and charge dice) to emerge as the badass you really are. In that context, maneuvers specifically should be the times you are struggling or slipping, to make your ultimate triumphs all the more glorious. That's how shonen works, and this game emulates those kinds of emotional rollercoasters splendidly as long as we're willing to go all in for both the PCs' highest highs and lowest lows.