30 Days of Writing: My Inkhaven Experience

Who knew monk mode is at odds with socializing.

I can summarize my Inkhaven experience in one anecdote. Close to the end Elizabeth Van Nostrand asked me how it had been. Said I:

“It’s been a total flop. My plan was to come, write from 8AM to 1PM, my usual schedule, and then spend the rest of the day socialising with friends from across the Bay. What actually happened is that jetlag took me out, I always woke up groggy, only started writing after lunch and went on until at least 6PM but as late as half past midnight. This meant I lost all the daily activities and all the socialization… It has made me a better writer, though, so there’s that.”

She paused, and then retorted:

“So the program achieved exactly what it set out to?”

…

The Writing

Looking back, here’s what happened: I spent the first 16 days writing a series. I worked on it every day, at the same time, typing from the same bench outside. I think this robotic behavior was just a consequence of how bad jetlag was and my trying to avoid feeling it by outworking it. I think the first two essays of that series are really solid—and they’re things I had been trying to get out for a while.

The rest of the series is fine in and of itself, and good in that I managed to say the same thing I’ve been trying to say in the book draft I claim to have written but which no one has seen in about 1/10th of the length. That seems important. I think a big mistake I made with the book was going depth-first instead of breadth-first and the nature of publishing a blog post a day forced me to fix that.

After those first two weeks there was a shift as the remaining jetlag washed over me.

A few pieces stand out from that time: my report on the Open Memetics Institute is a type of writing I enjoy a lot, as was my analysis of a former viral tweet . These two were the first time (after 18 days!) I asked for external feedback from the resident experts. I disagreed with both of theirs’ feedback but in articulating why I articulated thoughts about writing I didn’t know I had: I didn’t want the OMI piece to be clear because it couldn’t be—I had a personal 2-hours presentation on it to get it, no way I could get it across writing. I wanted it to drive excitement and I think I succeeded at that.

The other piece of advice was to rename the title of the second piece to ‘overanalysing my viral tweet’. I hated this: I wanted to be as serious as sin, not millennial reflexive self-deprecating.

Feeling bad in the morning because of staying up too late led to I Feel Bad and Don’t Want to Write—an exploration of Jhanas, the logarithmic theory of pleasure and pain, and its implications. I started writing it in bed trying to get it out before I had to get up and ended up finishing on my bench late into the night, freezing. It might be my favorite piece from this period and taught me I can write even when I feel rotten.

Day 21 is the piece I kept editing until half past midnight. It is very meaningful to me because it was the first time I got the referent for what a finished piece feels like. Before that I just vomited words onto the page. Now I understood what a piece is, as a piece. How it has to be internally coherent, beginning, middle and end; the work it had to do for the reader. If that were all I had learned at Inkhaven, it would already have been worth it. I learned other things as well.

My piece on why EY thinks babies aren’t conscious was as enlightening as it was disappointing: as I was used to vomiting onto the page I always either left with open questions or having shared what I already knew, but I didn’t actively figure new things out. This piece started with a puzzle I ended up solving through writing it, and solving it just felt deflating. AI had to coddle me and explain that deflation was good, actually, as it was a consequence of me having solved the puzzle I set out to solve.

The Jhanas FAQ was a piece that started with a joke. I knew I wanted to write those last two lines as my punchline. Writing everything before that just to make that joke land is some of the most fun I’ve had writing, ever.

Heartbroken is a piece about my feelings as an europoor. I found its reception highly confusing: people liked it enough to DM me about it, voted for it to be highlighted as one of my best pieces, even told me they liked it in person. Huge signal. But it’s one of the pieces that came out the fastest, probably in under two hours from sitting to publishing. I didn’t even send it out in the emails. That taught me that there is something important about the rawness of a piece.

For some pieces it seems editing makes them worse before making them better.

Human Writing in the Age of AI is a good one. It’s me wrestling with the impacts of AI in writing and reading, and thinking about how to position myself towards it. It’s also me trying to share Gendlin’s ideas. I like this piece a lot as it starts from the heart, explores with the head, and loops back to the heart.

On Foolishness and Communication taught me the same thing: just how bad I am at getting what I want to get across. I got some feedback from Gwern on the latter and seeing the highly abstract concepts which he was using to analyze the piece taught me about the levels there are to the writing game.

I also saw that he was—as someone would tell me later—analyzing it from the perspective of an ‘opinionated truth-seeker’. He said I ‘Hadn’t done my homework’ because I wasn’t placing my piece within nor referencing the existing conversation (EY’s Inferential Distance, etc.) which is very fair! I was not. But I associate that with academic writing more and less with just wanting to vomit my feelings onto a page. (I think his feedback too was wrong in that he told me how to optimize within my frame rather than questioning the frame I had selected. AI actually helped with the latter—it thinks I was misreading the group situation that inspired the piece and that the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t make my argument but that the group was at ‘negotiating norms’ stage, not at ‘finding out truth through argument’ stage.)

So, let’s look back on all that: 30 days, 6 pieces I like, 1 I really like, 1 other people really like, and 2 that taught me a lot. Oh, and one series compressed 10x. These seem like great stats to me??

(I also got 1 monthly paid and 1 yearly paid subscribers to the new blog [!!??] and 2 yearly paid on the old one—which is two more yearly paid than I ever had. No idea what to make about those numbers.)

Socializing: NYC

This part of the story starts a bit earlier. A week before Inkhaven was supposed to start, in SF, I flew into NYC. The plan was to work through the jet lag there first (lol) and to see what the NYC TPOT/Fractal scene was like. The first part of that plan failed. The second worked.

I was very impressed by the New York scene. TPOT is all about hyperstition so you never know just how much is people memeing things into reality versus… actual reality. It was very real: a bunch of young friends who all live next to one another, coordinated by the AI bootcamp they run together.

Emphasis on young and on friends. The feelings I wrote about in Heartbroken started blossoming there. It’s very hard to not think back to my Portuguese friends who have great difficulties getting out of their parent’s houses by 30. Even though they’re doing everything right: they studied, they have good jobs, etc. The country is structurally fucked.

And, on friends: the NYC scene is awesome. I was at a brunch that must’ve had 100 people, at an impromptu AI and Sensemaking unconference the next day that felt like it must have been put together six months in advance, I met a few friends from Twitter for the first time. But my overwhelming impression was that this was ultimately a large group of friends: they were super welcoming and would welcome me if I paid the entry fee of moving there.

Socializing: Bay Area

SF was different. It felt way looser. I managed to go to a house (non-)party on the first weekend and met 3 friends from Twitter I hadn’t seen in a while. Even got invited to dinner at one of their places. I also met Rasool, this British globetrotter who spends some time in London, then SF, then Hong-Kong, then Berlin, and round and round he goes. Deliberately shallow ties. That’s what the Bay felt like. He would accompany me in the social events the following weeks.

I managed to go to the Frontier Tower and hung out with two ex-coworkers, which was fun. I was invited to the Love Symposium and found another ex-coworker and some of the people I had met in New York. We didn’t talk much. I went to the weekly TPOT get-together, Office Hours, and felt just like in NYC: in the middle of a gathering of friends. Happy for them.

By then the jetlag had become too much: I would miss QRI’s presentation, bail on the dinner I had been invited to, and not go to Office Hours again.

(The lack of) Socializing: Inkhaven

On campus I basically missed all socialization opportunities the first two weeks except during lunch and dinner as I’d finish at 6PM and people were gearing up to write then. Even lunch was rushed though so that I could get back to writing.

Only in the middle of the third week did things change: I wasn’t going off-campus anymore, the jet lag was overcome, and I was more confident and quick in my writing.

We all went off-campus over a weekend to Bodega Bay. I think being forced into closed quarters made us grow closer.

In the last week I ended up in two circles around the fire with MEN—one of them during drinkhaven (exactly what it sounds like)—that each went on for five or six hours. Those were awesome. I enjoyed the MTG draft we did and all subsequent games. With some people I either had at least a few pleasant interactions or actually connected with—Adria, Alex, Ben, Claire, Daniel, Eneasz, Georgia, Hauke, Jenn, Joanna, Justin, the other Justin, Lucent, Lucie, Mahmoud, Markus, Michael, Mikhail, Natalia, Neil, Oli, Rafe, Sasha, Sean, and last but certainly not least, Vishal. This is 25/41(!) — I know it isn’t a numbers game but it’s weird to me that, with some other residents, I didn’t exchange more than a nod, or maybe even nothing at all.

I feel warmly about most of these 25 people, but I think I will only carry 1 or 2 relationships forward. Distance is hard.

Things might’ve been different had I quit on the Bay Area plan sooner. It’s hard to say.

Verdict

To answer Elizabeth’s question from the beginning: Yes, the program achieved exactly what it set out to.

I’m not sure how to feel about that.