I'd also be curious to hear about your thoughts on Inkhaven as a program, and not just your thoughts about writing every day and what that taught you? I've also been writing every day in November so am curious to hear what the "inkhaven experience" was like, since I've got a good idea what the writing-every-day aspect has been like.
Good call. I should've included more of that! Off the top of my head, I loved it because Lighthaven as a venue is cozy and delightful and because everyone involved was absolutely lovely. The participants were impressive and of course getting to hang out with other Contributing Writers (eg, Scott Aaronson, Scott Alexander, Dynomight -- filling out my top 3 favorite bloggers of all time) was pretty amazing. The organizers worked their butts off to make everything as conducive to writing as humanly possible. Plus a ton of fun activities as well -- hiking trips, open mic nights, you name it. And so many nice touches, like having an assortment of typewriters and fancy pens to try writing with. Or the Winner's Lounge with ice cream and video games that you're only allowed into once you've published for the day. And I'm only scratching the surface here. Very highly recommended!
Here I am on the plane on the way home from Inkhaven. Huge thanks to Ben Pace and the other organizers for inviting me. Lighthaven is a delightful venue and there sure are some brilliant writers taking part in this — both contributing writers and participants. With 40 posts published per day by participants (not counting those by organizers and contributing writers) it feels impossible to highlight samples of them. Fortunately that's been done for me: the Inkhaven spotlight. And just to semi-randomly pick a single post to highlight, for making me laugh out loud, I'll link to one by Rob Miles. There are also myriad poignant, insightful, informative, and otherwise delightful posts. And, sure, plenty that don't quite work yet. But that's the point: force yourself to keep publishing, ready or not, and trust that quality will follow.
Confession: I'm not at all happy with this post. Opening with "here I am on the plane"? Painful. I would've fixed that in an editing pass, but I'm going to leave it because it illustrates two Inkhaven lessons for me. First, that sometimes it's ok to hit publish before something is perfect. And second, that I in particular need to follow the advice (#5 in my collection of Inkhaven tips) to dedicate blocks of time to dumping words onto the page. Editing is separate. If I hadn't started typing "here I am on the plane" then I would've sat there agonizing about a good opener, gotten distracted, and had nothing.
Write, publish, repeat.
I'm still agonizing about whether to commit to continuing to churn out a post every day for the rest of the month now that I've left. I do have a pretty much unlimited number of ideas to write about, even sticking to the theme of writing about writing. Here are half a dozen of them:
The problem is how daunting it feels to do justice to some of those. But that's where the writing tip to First Just Write comes in. It's been half an hour now of writing this thing and I'm starting to think I could bear to hit publish. If I do, I expect it will be the worst post I've published while at Inkhaven. But something has to be my worst post.
Judge for yourself. Here's a recap of everything else I published leading up to and during my Inkhaven stay: