I Went To A Writing Retreat And All I Got Are These 30 Blogposts
god i wish Lighthaven was real
Today, April 30th, is the last day of Inkhaven.
I came to Inkhaven because I had a lot I wanted to write, and I was bad at reliably sitting down and writing. I was looking forward to having a container where I could just like have regular routines and practices around writing—my plan was that, every day, I’d wake up in the morning to go on a run, and then I’d sit down for two hours without distractions and write. Due to the kind of work I do, I often have Various Commitments that make it difficult to really silo off a month to just focus on writing, so this container would be a nice change of pace.
And then, the day before Inkhaven started, I got the flu. So a lot of those routines went out the window, and I spent the first week curled up in my room. I wasn’t able to socialize, I wasn’t able to make friends, which sucked. But I kept writing and put some stuff out there. Probably the best post from when I was sick was LLMs make it easier to be young and stupid (because I am young and stupid).
I came into Inkhaven with a couple big drafts I really wanted to get out, some of which had been on my mind for years.
Fixers, Legibility, and Networks, my collection of thoughts on how networks work and how to expose you and your friends to upside through them.
I published the first piece of this as Intro to Intros
Everything I Know About Podcast Production
I published the first piece of that as You Should Start A Podcast Even If You Hate Podcasts
Broken People Are Hard To Sort (an essay on Better Call Saul)
I tried and failed to finish this one.
Have You Heard Of Blood On The Clocktower (published!)
I also moved a section to publish as a standalone piece.
Building A Podcast Studio At Lighthaven (published!)
So, there’s still a lot more for me to write here.
I also wrote a lot of smaller pieces, many of which were motivated by “oh god I have to make the deadline”—I think some of these (Trades With Fae, my wrestling piece, my negotiation piece) were pretty okay, while most of the others were…slop. (my one line here was that I Would Not Metapost (writing something about the experience of being at Inkhaven, which many of my fellow residents occasionally did, between their excellent pieces).
I also finally wrote up some of the things around ~agency and low WIS that I’d been grappling with the last couple of years, in Piercing The Delusion and Optimizing Over People. That was wonderful.
Editing
All my pieces could have used a lot more editing. Normally, my process is something like:
Write an outline
Forget about the piece for six months
Return, try to fill out the outline
Wait 1-3 more months
Get a first draft
Polish it up, send to ~10-15 people for feedback
Give it 1-2 more editing passes with the feedback, then hit publish
Believe it or not, this didn’t fit well into the Inkhaven deadlines! So, I had to force myself to write crappy drafts, and then publish the crappy drafts.
Passion Is All You Need
My (in-progress) Better Call Saul piece is quite heated and personal to me—I first wrote up an outline+a lot of individual points/paragraphs like six months ago, and have been trying to finish it since. The problem is, when I try to write more about it, everything I write is much worse than whatever came out when I was first thinking about it, because I don’t have that passion driving me.
My Blood On The Clocktower piece was, similarly, outlined in a fit of passion immediately after Metagame. At Bodega Bay (the mandatory writer’s retreat from the writer’s retreat), I ran a couple games of Clocktower and loved it, slipped back into passion for the game, and finished+published the full piece. And I got a lot of feedback along the lines of “wow, I can tell you really care about this, it makes the piece much better!”
So, the next time I have something like the BCS piece, where the topic is extremely alive for me, I should just take an Adderall as soon as I can and bang out the piece over a couple hours. When I’m writing without that passion, it feels like I’m just soullessly extruding words, and I look at what I’ve written and go “wow this kinda sucks”, in a way which is improved with serious editing but not completely fixed. Ozy always tells me that everyone’s first million words suck, and this makes it hard to write if you have good taste—I am now about 28k words closer to being able to write Words That Don’t Suck.
Speaking of Words That Don’t Suck
Inkhaven had a lot of ways to get better as a writer. There were advisors that you were encouraged to run your posts by before publishing—I’d often get feedback from Justis or Alexander Wales before publishing, which definitely improved my pieces. There were also office hours from folks like Scott Alexander and Gwern, where we could get detailed feedback on posts of ours (even if we’d already published)—I pretty much didn’t go to any of these, and I wish I did. I always was like “oh I have to get my draft ready for office hours” and then my draft was NEVER READY FOR OFFICE HOURS and I didn’t end up going. In retrospect I should have just gotten feedback on stuff I’d already published. Ah well.
I also wish I’d spent more time on Inkhaven itself. Especially in the last couple weeks, I deprioritized my writing and spent less time at Lighthaven specifically, and I think I would’ve gotten more out of the month if I’d put more time and effort into my writing. (Still, I wrote, like, 3 times more than my previous Total Internet Output, which is pretty great!)
Anyways, Inkhaven was incredible, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to Write More or Write Better. The people are amazing, the venue is incredibly beautiful, and it succeeded in getting me to write more!
Some advice for Those Who Come After:
Have a To Write list. Whenever you have an idea of something to write about or yell at people about, put it in there. You will need it when it’s 11pm and you Need Something To Write About.
Also, think about which posts are “shortposts” that you can get out in ~30min when you’re Up Against The Deadline, and make sure you have enough to get you through the month. Most of your posts will not be long effortposts.
So, there’s still much more for me to do and to write—if you wanna read whatever I put out after Inkhaven, well….
I still want to read that BCS piece
)