Is there no way to put more emphasis on quality rather than quantity of writing?
I feel like this community doesn’t lack prolific writers, if anything there’s too much to read. I probably only manage to read about 15% of my Substack subscriptions, and I use AI to summarize another 15%.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to experiment with something like one post every five days with a length limit, and at the end of each cycle a jury evaluates the posts? Then, for example, the six lowest-rated writers leave. I haven’t thought this through deeply, it’s just an idea for a more quality-centered structure.
for me, inkhaven was a lot of fun. can hugely recommend. one very important thing is that you need to dedicate effort to being agentic about your writing and your goals. i somewhat didn’t, and that meant that i didn’t get nearly as much value out of it as i hoped for.
A specific failure mode I experienced was that I was told that there would be scheduled time with a coach to think about the goals for the writing and other things; and so I outsourced these things to the time that would’ve been dedicated to them; but then, it was never actually scheduled.
So I almost never thought hard about what I want to do, having cached that there is a dedicated time for that; and so way over half of my posts were written because I needed to write something, and not because I was actively trying to write something for some reason other than “I’ll need to have published a post every day”.
I did not go hard on writing awesome things; did not really experiment with different styles and genres; did very little editing, despite initially setting out to spend a lot more time editing pieces than writing them (including because that was how I turned into a good writer in Russian). I did very little thinking about how do I want to improve.
Sadly, I only realized a couple of days before the end of November. I think I could’ve gotten at least 10x more value out of Inkhaven if I figured out earlier that this was going on.
1as (likely) one of these two people -- I still glad I did it / Ben let me do it anyway.
I can think of around ~two people who knew that writing a single blogpost in a day simply wasn't how they could produce writing they're proud of, and have since taken substantial parts of their writing offline.
I went in predicting it might not be me!compatible and this turned out to be true! I found publishing work in this way pretty unpleasant but also worthwhile? That said, I think many of the great things in my life have also been unpleasant and worthwhile (sailing across the atlantic; organizing large events; falling in love with the wrong person). In this spirit, I am glad I did inkhaven.
Things I liked include: The organizing team was cool and wrote real good. I made more friends than posts I liked. It was cool to see how publishing became soo much easier over the month. I enjoyed spending time occupying my own brain space. I learned things about myself. I learned things about other people. I enjoyed being around many people trying. The food was good and flexible. I noticed generating material from thin air for a blog everyday made me better at telling stories at parties.
If I were to do inkhaven for the first time again: I would set up systems to get over myself (for example just request feedback, make a script or flip a coin if you have to) and get to know people earlier on in the program -- as those turned out to be my favorite parts.
happy to see an april version!
4
1If you didn't expect to complete the program, or didn't expect to like the program, you probably wouldn't go. My takeaway here is less that Inkhaven is very good and more that the people who might go to Inkhaven are very good at predicting whether it'll go well for them.
I have come to spread the good word: we're doing Inkhaven again, this April 1 – 30. You can apply on the website.
Why are we doing another cohort?
Inkhaven activates people as bloggers/writers. We had 41 residents, and all of them completed the program of 30 posts in 30 days.[1] Of those 41, 30 have continued to submit blogposts to the Inkhaven slack since December 2nd, with those 30 publishing an average of 1 post per week since then.
But also because the month of first cohort of Inkhaven one was one of my favorite months of my life. I got to write, and be surrounded by writers that I respected.
What happened the first time?
As I say, people actually published. If we add in all the visiting writers and staff who also submitted posts to Inkhaven (e.g. I wrote for 20 continuous days of the 30), then here are some summary stats.
To be clear, some of the residents did more than their mandatory 30. One day Screwtape published 3 posts. Not to be outdone, local blogging maniac Michael Dickens published 10 (!) posts in a single day. And on the last day, Vishal (who read an incredible ~80% of the content produced during Inkhaven) published a blogpost that has 22 short posts faithfully in the voice of the 22 different residents.
People overall had a pretty great experience. Here are some assorted quotes from the feedback form and blogposts they wrote about their experience.
What else happened?
Over 20 established writers came by to offer support, feedback, classes, and advice. Scott Alexander, Gwern, Scott Aaronson, Adam Mastroianni, Alexander Wales, Andy Matuschak, Aella, Clara Collier, Ozy, Slime Mold Time Mold, Dynomight, and many more. Dwarkesh Patel came and did a Q&A, and CJ the X came and gave a midnight-talk on objectivity in art while drinking alcohol.
These people contributed so much to the culture of Inkhaven and gave inspiration and feedback for the Residents' writing.
How much did people like it?
Here's the feedback form that 39/41 people filled out.
I showed this to Scott Alexander and he described the feedback as 'good'.
To be clear, it wasn't for everyone. One or two people knew that 30 posts in 30 days wasn't going to be good for them, and one or two people had jobs to keep up that stressed them out, and I'm not sure it was worth it for them.
Did people get better as writers?
I'd say that the main thing that happens is you actually write. That's the thing that happens here. Some people came in knowing what they wanted to write about, and they wanted to get it out. Some people came having no idea what they wanted, except that they wanted to explore. People had different goals and grew in different ways.
What kind of writing did the people write?
All sorts. There was history blogging, econ blogging, fictional futuristic vignettes, health advice, math blogging, dramatic personal life stories, project management advice, mental health advice, fictional parody, rationality blogging, AI alignment blogging, romance blogging, cyberpunk blogging, YouTube blogging, therapy blogging, global conflict blogging, humor, gender blogging, and, of course, writing advice.
You can view ~30 essays that did especially well on Hacker News, LessWrong, and/or as voted by Residents, in the featured essays portion of the Inkhaven website.
Why should I do this?
If you would like to grow from someone who wants to be a writer, or someone who blogs occasionally, or someone who has written some good things but not invested as much as you'd like into writing, Inkhaven is your opportunity to graduate into "actual blogger".
There were also many established bloggers who grew by doing Inkhaven—Michael Dickens, Tsvi BT, Angadh, etc. It's also an opportunity to cut out distractions and focus on your writing for a month.
Why should I not do this?
I can think of around ~two people who knew that writing a single blogpost in a day simply wasn't how they could produce writing they're proud of, and have since taken substantial parts of their writing offline. I'm not saying this is good for literally everyone, though I do think it is good for most people who want to be writers.
I can think of around ~two people who had serious external commitments that made focusing on their writing difficult or painful during the month, and one of them may have regretted coming due to that.
Can I buy cute Inkhaven stickers?
Yes! Jenn made some that you can buy here. I have them on my laptop.
How much does Inkhaven cost?
The program fee is $2,000. Housing at Lighthaven starts at $1.5k, so the price is $3.5k.
Financial aid is available, and last cohort around half of the residents received some amount of financial aid.
What is the application process?
Basically you just show us some of your existing writing, and we guess whether we'd like to read more of it from you.
How can I apply or find our more info?
Go to the website to apply and find out more info!
I look forward to spending April with some of you reading this :-)
With the technical exception of one blogger who, in some effort to experiment as a rule-breaker, on his last day published a blogpost below the 500-word limit. So technically, instead of 41* 30 = 1230 mandatory blogposts, we got 1229, and the last one was a blogpost but it was just ~300 words. I'm going to roughly ignore this as being irrelevant in most relevant contexts about whether the program works and whether people complete it.