It goes without saying this is a repost from my personal blog

The Inkhaven Residency is a program that where residents write one blog post a day, for thirty days and are provided mentorship from established bloggers. That would be extremely beneficial to me, but impractical.

30 blog posts in 30 days is a satisfyingly round number. There was nothing stopping me from doing this experiment on my own. Yesterday I hit the half-way mark of this experiment. 15 days, 15 blog posts, which is as logical milestone as any to reflect on the experiment.

It is important to note: I’m doing this without guidance. Which makes this a very different beast to the residency. And a painful reminder of the anonymity of the internet: if you build it, they won’t come. You need to put just as much effort into actively promoting your work as producing it. As a result, I have gotten little in the way of engagement which makes garnering feedback and guidance hard.

I thought I might share what I’ve noticed.

Most surprising was how difficult it is to come up with suitable ideas. I’m an “ideas guy” kinda guy. And on the first day I did come up with 24 post ideas, but I’ve only used 5 so far. 

Vomiting out ideas like a fire-hose ain’t too tricky, but developing viable ideas that fit certain criteria, that’s damn tricky. Since I have to write one post every 24 hours, I need to limit myself to ideas which can be researched quickly and thoroughly, but still leaves time to write several drafts before midnight, every night. I quickly realized how untenable this was writing my post about the end of the Simpsons and Mercedes f1 golden eras. I realized that I didn’t understand thoroughly enough the personnel changes, politics and the internal mechanics. This would require much more research than I could possibly manage in a day. Maybe even a year would be too short.

Scrounging every day for a new post idea takes so much time it precludes my writing “banker” posts, or doing preliminary research for posts which I might research and write over several days. Instead, I would spend hours brainstorming and rejecting ideas, saying to myself “well I’d need to research that” or find myself asking: “do I have the facts to back that up?”.

Scrounging daily for ideas and topics also had an unfortunate side-effect. It made my posts sanctimonious – a quality I cringe at. Rather than synthesizing information from different sources, I rested on “obvious” topics I was already very confident in. These topics tended to be gripes, bugbears, or things I wish were different. And yes, I did construct strawmen: nebulous “theys” and “themmins” who do all the things wrong. That was opposite of what I wanted: This experiment excited me, partly because of the opportunity to develop and refine my thinking on 30 new topics. Not pontificate on 30 old ones.

I’ve shifted strategy. I’ve tried to write in a “thinking out aloud” style about questions that don’t require research – such as personal definitions of words or concepts - or to write satirical pieces – like a cover letter for a cartoon character, who is applying for a job with a supervillain. 

Another format is writing complex concepts at the introductory level, like my description of the Technicolor IB printing process, or Variable Frame Rate Video muxing. I have sufficient background that the research can be done quickly. This does better suites my purposes, as explanatory writing is probably a useful skill for me.

Once a topic was finally decided, the actual writing a first draft comes suspiciously easy. So easy that I can’t help but think I must be doing something wrong.

There were two notable exceptions: I tried to write a parody of the Accusing Parlour scenes at the end of most Murder Mysteries, you know the trope: Miss Marple or Poirot gathers all the suspects in the same room. And rehashes all the motives, dirty laundry and personal secrets, of each and every suspect before finally revealing the actual murderer. Communicating all that exposition was really difficult, especially when you have to make it up. And it’s no more satisfying to write that exposition than it is to wade through as a TV audience.

Another exception was when I tried to write a Dr. Seuss-esque rhyming fable. The subject was an “irrelevant elephant” that learns the importance of initiating social outings with friends, as a remedy to feeling lonely. Finding suitable rhymes of “Gazelle”, and rhyming “irrelevant” with “evident” was pretty hard.

Apart from that, as I said, most first drafts came easily. Writing the actual words is enjoyable. Editing is a pain. I find it helps to read out aloud while editing, as certain errors or omissions seem to be invisible to my eyes, unless I’m vocalizing them.

“If I was to do this over again”, you ask?

I would have spent much more time thinking about who my audience is. I wrongly assumed that merely writing everyday would be enough – and I would get better as long as I wrote, and kept writing. I’ve changed my mind: the quality of writing is a property of how well it suites an audience, even an imaginary one. If you write without an audience in mind, it’ll suck.

A clear audience in mind provides a bank of assumptions that guide your writing. For example, whether or not you should explain a word like “Muxing” or give context to a certain fine-artist, the use of hyperbole - such as calling someone a “philistine” as a joke, and to whom you make jokes at the expense of: all this is informed by choice of audience. I would have picked an arbitrary audience and just written with them in mind.

I also would have made each post not about a topic, but about a technique: I’d write using different rhetorical tropes and in different genres every day. Basically updating Dionysian Imitatio to the modern day (a Hellenistic pedagogical technique where students try to write pastiches of established genres, or transmute topics from one genre to another). So one blog post might be a fictional press release, another might be a fictional public apology, and more stuff like the Accusing Parlour parody – as difficult as that was.

In retrospect, I think I would have been better served by writing a single longer form piece, like an e-book. This would allow me more time to research a topic. I could probably interest more beta-readers and thus elicit feedback over a longer stretch of time. But I’m stubborn as a mule: I’m over half-way now so I’ll see this through.