Originally written for my substack. Cross posting here as reports of Inkheaven-like intensive writing experiences might be valuable!
A month ago, during a video call, a friend of mine mentioned the Inkheaven residency. He told me it’s a writing program happening in November where participants are under threat of publishing one blog post every day for 30 days, or getting sent home. To make things slightly easier, they get to work from a beautiful campus in Berkeley and receive mentoring from some of the best bloggers in the rationalist part of the Internet.
The idea stuck with me after the call. I wanted to refocus my career to include more creative work, but I needed to deepen my craft. Every time I published something online, it felt like a succession of strenuous steps that miraculously culminated in putting something out.
I needed to practice the entire loop, from coming up with good ideas to writing them down, to publishing and navigating the whole emotional rollercoaster that comes with exposing vulnerable parts of yourself on the Internet. And as Scott Alexander put it in the quote that captures the philosophy behind the Inkheaven program: “Whenever I see a new person who blogs every day, it’s very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don’t get good.”
Committing publicly to posting every day for a month felt like a challenge of the right size. It was utterly terrifying. The kind of fear that gets to your bones, the kind that comes from realizing that I might actually fail at this, and everybody will know about it.
I also knew that, in theory, I had the skills to make it work. At all the jobs I had, I was known to be an intense writer. I would produce between one and three documents every week; this has always been my way to make progress. This made the challenge even scarier. The failure would be even harsher, because I could succeed.
When discussing the option with my partner, she reminded me of two of my mantras: If I am never failing and never leaning on my support circle, it means I am not trying hard enough. At this point, I knew I should commit to doing the whole thing, and I also knew I could count on her emotional support. This is how I decided to organize my own little Inkheaven, not in sunny California, but in my snowy and dark Estonia.
The clarity of the critical path.
Having to publish every day forces you to see clearly how you can best use your time to get closer to a published post. So much so that the main skill I developed over the month is recognizing productive work.
When working on a post, it’s like there is a clear but unstable path, like a mountain edge, that starts from a blank page and ends in a draft that is good enough to polish and publish. When writing, I am like a ball rolling, falling on one side, and getting back on track. It is so easy to get distracted. I would tell myself that checking this link is the most important thing right now; the research will enrich the post’s content. No, it isn’t. The most important thing right now is to write with deliberate attention, focusing on every single word while tying them to the big picture.
After a few days, I became really good at sensing when I began to fall away from this critical path, and softly focusing my attention back to the edge of the writing. This made me much better at estimating how long a writing task would take, as I would cut out the unproductive loops that often ate up hours of “writing” time.
This clarity propagated upwards. After the second week, I started to feel the critical path not only while writing, but also before, when planning a post.
I found that the best way to prepare for writing is writing itself. I did not have enough time to do research deep dives, so I had to rely on ideas already in my head. Even simply writing bullet points to plan the outline of a post was unhelpful. There are many crucial details that become clear only once you start writing a story that holds together at a low level, so that the high-level plan never feels important.
The most productive kind of thinking to do ahead of writing was to think about which topic to write about. At first, I felt that I would have so many days that I could pick almost any topic from my backlog of blog post ideas and write about it. It was a crucial mistake. It turns out, I need to care about what I write to get to the end.
Emotional rollercoaster.
This realization fit into a broader set of lessons related to the breadth of emotions that come from writing about your ideas and receiving feedback from the Internet. Feedback became my only salary, a very volatile salary. My self-esteem would oscillate between feeling that reading my content was a waste of time after a Lesswrong comment destroyed the claims of my post, and receiving a kind comment from a friend, flipping my motivation and starting to work on the next post.
I am grateful to my partner and all my friends who took the time to read some of this writing and send me their kind feedback. This would really have been much, much harder without your support <3
I also stopped cross-posting my post to Lesswrong to stabilize the emotional challenge at the cost of reducing the audience.
Shedding ideas.
While at the beginning I was vaguely hoping that at least one of my posts might gain significant traction on X or on Lesswrong, by the end of the challenge, the aim had changed to clearing my mind.
I realized I have been accumulating tens of half-baked insights that could be worth sharing, sometimes dating from a few years ago. Writing about these old thoughts felt like shedding a thick layer of hair I hadn’t noticed growing over the years. I feel lighter now that these ideas are out of my system. They can live on their own, they are in a format I can reference for others, and for my future self. I also felt the nakedness, the vulnerability that comes from sharing something that has been living inside me for so long without seeing the light of day.
But by far, it has been very satisfying to prioritize getting these old ideas out there, even if they were not always the easiest to write about. I feel free to tackle new thinking challenges!
What are my best posts?
If you had only three posts to read, I would recommend these ones. First, Wrap and extend. This is one of those old ideas that finally got out. It is written by hand on my e-ink tablet (the BOOX Go 10.3). I had a lot of fun writing it; it felt like a very long whiteboarding session.
Second, I would recommend My experience running a 100k. I am happy with the way I was able to tell the story and incorporate humor into the text.
And finally, have a look at The rise of framemakers, which is a good intro to my vision of a wholesome future with AI.
Carefully crafted thirty-day challenges.
I can feel how this experience has made me more confident in my writing; it slowly expanded my sense of identity over a month, to the point where I can now call myself an “online writer” without cringing at the thought. I believe this is a result of three ingredients that apply to skills you’d want to develop (from Daniel Kazandjian’s in this great episode of the Metagame):
If you are interested in taking a similar challenge, feel free to get in touch! I’d be happy to talk about my experience.
Closing thoughts.
It is now time to rest. It has been a tiering challenge, working between three to five hours every day on writing, while starting a collaboration with Francisco, working on Twitter data analysis. I will not keep this pace in the future, but I am still likely to maintain a rhythm much higher than before the challenge.
Thank you to everyone who has been reading and engaging with my posts, and to my friends and partner for their support. Stay posted for future writings!