So you want to go to next year's Inkhaven
How NOT to write 30 blog posts in 30 days
During the closing ceremony of Inkhaven on November 30th, the organizers had us all fill out a feedback survey. While filing in my response, I realized the problem that I’d been having all month.
What I’d wanted to get out of Inkhaven was not what the organizers intended for people to get out of Inkhaven.
I came to Lighthaven with a draft folder full of half-finished pieces that I wanted to take across the finish line. A lot of them were effortposts that needed extensive revisions. I struggle with procrastination and perfectionism, so I figured that Inkhaven would be the perfect environment for me.
My posts ended up divided into these rough categories:
Slice of life
Autobiographical stories
Stream of consciousness
Effortposts
Citation-heavy facts posts
Philosophical reasoning
The problem is that my brain can only do hardcore research or philosophical reasoning for a few hours per day. If I’d been working on an effortpost all day, and it became clear that I wasn’t going to finish it by midnight, then I needed to pivot and spit out some filler to post for the day. This is decidedly Not Fun after I’d been struggling with a long effortpost that hadn’t been coming together all day.
The problem with effortposts is that they took a long time to write. Even if I already had a draft. Especially if I already had a draft, which I showed to Scott Alexander during his Office Hours, and he (very politely) ripped it to shreds right before my eyes, and then I had to completely re-write it. 1
This is what a Good Day at Inkhaven looked like:
Get up and head downstairs before 9am,
Sit in one of the Aumann kitchen booths,
Write while the kitchen is nice and quiet (with the coffee nearby),
Have a draft ready before lunch,
Send draft to writing mentor and/or a feedback circle,
Get feedback from said mentor/feedback circle in the afternoon,
Polish it up and post before dinner.
Do you see how Step 1 of this plan involves getting up before 9am?
Yeah, me too.
An average day looked more like this:
Wake up groggy at ~7am,
Scroll phone in bed for 2–3 hours,
Roll out of bed and get to the kitchen around 10:30am,
Try to write, but be unable to focus due to bad sleep,
People have started showing up in the kitchen, so now it’s loud and hard to focus,
Try to go write somewhere else semi-public, but the kitchen booth has become “my writing spot” and nowhere else around Lighthaven feels “right” for getting words out,
Go back up to my room for some peace and quiet,
Finish the post, but I’ve spent the entire day alone and missed all the day’s social activities,
Try to socialize at 11pm after posting,
Stay up until 12:30am or 1am,
Go to bed way too late,
Repeat.
There were tons of workshops and activities going on during the day, which I usually skipped in order to write. Meanwhile, I was surrounded by cool people for a month, and I barely had time to hang out and socialize. (Or read their stuff!)
My biggest regret is not having enough time to read more of what everyone else was posting.
The best, most relaxing days were when I typed up some stream of consciousness slice of life post on the typewriter, transcribed it into the Substack editor, and then hit post.2 Then I had plenty of time to attend some workshops/events, and hang out with cool people.
And you know what? Trauma dumping some stream of consciousness on a clicky clacky typewriter did wonders for my mental health. Lots of emotional processing happened. I felt much better after writing those posts.
Meanwhile, the most fun I had while writing was for that ridiculous suicide booth post. I wrote it in an hour and a half at the Bodega Bay dining room table, all while cackling like a madwoman.
I’m proud of my effortposts. I’m glad that I got them out the door. But man was it hard. And I probably would have done much better, emotionally, with just writing a fresh, simple post every morning.
Trying to finish posts in a rush was not fun. And I didn’t have the opportunity to get (much) feedback at 10:30pm.
So! If you’re interested in doing the next Inkhaven, don’t expect to get very many effortposts out the door. Maybe one per week. I would advise against showing up with too many existing drafts. Try to write posts from scratch during the event.
Definitely try out the typewriter! 10/10 fun. The organizers rented two typewriters from the typewriter store in Berkeley just for Inkhaven, and they plan to buy the Selectric and keep it as a permanent fixture at Lighthaven.
Scott later admitted that he was worried about being too harsh during his Office Hours. I reassured him that no, everyone loves it when he’s giving feedback. He’s practically a teddy bear compared to Gwern.
The first couple of typewriter posts, I re-typed them by hand. For the final post, I took a photo and had Claude transcribe it. Then I had to correct all of Claude’s hallucinations.
FYI, Adobe acrobat is really good at making pdf text machine readable. Probably better than Claude