Inkhaven was an event held at Lighthaven where 41 bloggers came to do 30 posts of 500 words or more in 30 days. I was there for the middle two weeks as a Contributing Writer, which meant that I didn’t have to post, but was around to talk to people about writing, review pieces, and offer feedback. Since I wasn’t participating and wasn’t there the full time, my perspective is very skewed. These people are bloggers though, so surely have given their own accounts.
From a social perspective, the vibes were great, and I enjoyed meeting and talking with people about the craft of writing or whatever else was on their minds. I would guess that I met about half of the residents, though I’d known a few of them going in from previous events like LessOnline. The relatively small size and purity of purpose meant that it was very communal, and I would often walk into a space to see a dozen people with their heads down at their computers, typing away.
That said, there was definitely a tension between people doing the work and socializing. Since everyone was obligated to write 500 words a day, and most of the bloggers were driven to write worthwhile posts rather than just dashing off something, it was often the case that people would break away from an interesting conversation with “sorry, I have to go write”. I think this is a great excuse, and wish that I could use it in other contexts, but there was definite pressure underlying a lot of the interactions.
One of the other impacts was that the dedication to writing and sheer output of the residents meant that it simply wasn’t possible to read even a fraction of what was being written unless you were a complete masochist, and so it was relatively rare that any given piece would become a part of the fabric of conversation. I think it would have been nice for a few of the standout pieces to float to the top of discussion more than they did, but this largely didn’t happen. Who had time to read all that when there was writing to do?
In theory, the Winner’s Room was a place where people could congregate and take a load off, but in practice most people were waiting to post until after 11pm, and that’s fairly late to sit around chatting and eating ice cream, especially with yet another post to write for the looming tomorrow.
My role there was to talk writing and provide feedback, and I feel like I ended up with some self-inflicted wounds in the process. I gave three talks in total, which could definitely have been more polished, but after each of them, I got a pile of things to read and respond to. The worst day was the one where I gave a talk on what I thought made for a successful personal essay or memoir-writing, and I got nine pieces to review, which is not a small number. By the time I was through them, I felt like my brain was turning to mush. I think I never ended up reading and responding to less than four in a day, which would have been more manageable if I wasn’t trying to stay on top of my own writing and some other obligations. In an ideal world, these would all have come through the Airtable system, and I would have proper stat tracking, as well as being able to say “actually, my queue is insane”, but they would come through that, through DMs, and in person.
Some of the advice was evergreen, things that I’d want to drill into any writer, including myself: hook the reader in the first paragraph or two, make a promise of what they’ll get from reading the post, make sure you understand the context the reader is in, trim away unnecessary fat, don’t engage in hedging unless it’s vital because it stalls momentum, don’t engage in defensive writing unless that’s your audience … things that I think are important to underline, insofar as they inform my theory of craft.
Other advice was very specific to a piece. There’s a perennial issue with writing where you end up packing too many ideas into a single piece, and while this can work in sprawling web fiction, it’s usually better to disentangle those ideas and give them their own separate places, or to at least see them for what they are and attempt a synthesis between them, or some commentary through placing them together. Sometimes there’s something easier to point out, like when there’s a missing bridge between topics, or when the ending needs a button. I think this kind of feedback is good and necessary, but I’m not sure how much it generalizes, and I think the point of being on hand to give commentary was to help hone analytical skills rather than improve one of thirty blog posts for the month.
The most difficult aspect for me, aside from the (admittedly self-imposed) workload, was dealing with voice. Sometimes I would get a piece and see that it was written in a specific style or tone, and coming in cold to a person’s method of writing is always a bit tricky. You need to understand a writer’s voice before you can critique what they’re doing with it, and sometimes it’s the voice itself that you need to critique. Voice is so individual, and so personal, that it’s hard to read something someone wrote and go “actually, you would be a better writer if you removed this element of your own personal style”, not to mention how easy it would be to misdiagnose, especially if there are simply differences in preference.
The other major hurdle for me is that I’m primarily a fiction writer, and primarily a longform fiction writer. While there seemed to be plenty of fiction for me to read, and while there’s a lot of overlap in terms of craft skills, a few people handed me more technical pieces, and I was less certain that I was giving actionable feedback that would actually help them. I was much more able to tell what was working or not working about a short story.
Would I do it again? Yeah, probably. I liked being in an intensive writing environment, even if I was running in high gear most of the time I was there (but again, this was also due to juggling other responsibilities). I think if my wife were fine being left home alone, I could do a whole month and would probably leave with nothing left in the tank, socially and intellectually speaking.
My biggest regret was that I never got the third issue of the Loop, our event zine out. The task landed on my shoulders, and I said “sure!”, but had never done a zine before, and now, still haven’t. I’d done an activity where people could write short stories to a prompt, and ended up getting a lot of them, but while I read and responded to them all (I think), I never got the zine ready to go, mostly because I prioritized reading and responding to the things that people sent me and just didn’t have the brainpower to figure out unfamiliar formatting. My bad on that one, it was a real disappointment. I also didn’t reply to all the stuff that came in after I was gone, and while I intend to still do that, at a certain point it’ll just too late. Mostly this is because of burnout on my part.
My favorite thing, aside from sitting by the fire and chatting with other writers, was probably being directly told that I had actually helped people. To have someone say, “you helped me make that post good” felt great, though a few of those times my major contribution was just to be a sounding board and brainstorming partner.
As for what I’d want done differently … I think curation of the blogging firehose would be great, but don’t know how that could actually be accomplished. I think it would be nice for residents to have a “polished post”, something that they were encouraged to spend more time on and getting to a state where it really shone, with some attention by the rest of the residents. And while we’d have messages going around when someone got to the front page of Hacker News, I would love to have had a formalized “Feats” board which featured those pieces that got attention, went viral, or just generally “performed” in the modern blogging ecosystems.
Here are some things I liked and read while here:
Soul-Whore by Eneasz Brodski
The Mad Olympiad by Tomás Bjartur
The Shibari Game by Robert Miles
7 Vicious Vices of Rationality by Ben Pace
The time Weird Al Yankovic went too far by Kuiper
The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant by Aevylmar (not technically Inkhaven)
Brazilian Jiujitsu Stories #1 by Vishal Prasad
And probably others that I would put here in an “oh yeah, that one” kind of way if reminded. I read what felt like so so many posts and stories and essays, some of which were much longer than 500 words, or not technically a part of Inkhaven, or which maybe weren’t even published anywhere accessible.
Overall, it was a great experience for me, would do again, but with slightly fewer things on my plate at the same time.
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