How Inkhaven failed me. How Inkhaven 2 could be better.

Warning: more cynical than I endorse. Skip to next part if you want my reasonable advice.

Inkhaven! You were supposed to strap me in and force me to write! I flew all the way from France so I could develop a skill I could bring back. Now, I only have developed friendships I’ll lose anyway at the end of the program.

I did not need new friends. I already way too good at making friends. The thing I wanted was to write, for once. I just wanted to write.

And there you tempted me every day with those amazing people from all around the world. Of course I would spend all my time with them to make friends. It’s how I’m built. It’s my default action.

Inkhaven, you were supposed to change me. Not push me to fail in the same way as I always had.

Oh dear, you never take the time to write because your Parisian social life eats all your time? Don’t worry, Inkhaven is there for you! Fly accross the world, far away from your friends, and don’t tell anyone you’re here. You’ll be able to write, finally. You’ll live the life of the writer: a walk in nature to let ideas flow, a cup coffee and a notebook to arrange your thoughts, and hours of uninterrupted time for you to type your words down, and each day craft a masterpiece. Everything will be designed for your success. We’ll guide you back to the life of the writer each time you stumble. Here, writing is your priority, everything else can wait.

What a bunch of fucking lies.

The only pressure to write was the deadline. I could have set up a beeminder goal and done it at home. I would have written more.

I was staying off campus. I should have stayed away from Lighthaven. Come for dinner, talk a bit about writing, and then leave prompty, before I could start to care about those other people.

But I care about them! I’m so glad to have met all of them, and I hope to see them again in the future. And that’s my issue. I care too much about others. I wanted to be put in a setting where I could care about writing instead.

Coming to Inkhaven was a mistake.

It did not bring me the focus I wanted.

It only teared away more of my heart, to be stuck in the Bay and all the other places where my friends will go back.

Loin des yeux, loin du cœur.

When the joy of the new friendships fades away with the distance. What will remain? 30 posts. 5 good ones. No potential writing career started. No new insights to elevate my writing. No new habits of focused attention on the craft.

If I had stayed in Paris, I could have kept the friends I made this month.

If I had gone far away from everyone, I could have gotten real thoughts and self-actualization done.

Three years ago, I read The Apollo Almanac on LessWrong. It made me realize I needed self actualization. I needed to write, a lot. I went to the countryside, alone in a remote house, cut from all Internet access. I wrote 12h per day for four days and a half, around 50h total. During this time, I changed my life.

I checked how much time I spent writing at Inkhaven in the entire month: 54h. You see the issue.

Ozy said that writers are weird, because they chose a career where they stay at home and don’t talk to anyone all day.

Inkhaven could have been the life of the writer. Just forbid any talking before 6pm, outside of specific structured feedback sessions.

Lighthaven is a place designed for encouraging stimulating intellectual conversations. What I needed was a place designed for encouraging focus on the craft.

Maybe Lighthaven could be such a place, if the program was designed with time spent focused as its goal.

The team optimized the program for many things, including making contributing writers feel valued (through artificially increasing the attendance of their talks), making the sponsors happy to have paid, making the residents become friends with each other, making them go to feedback circles they did not need. They did not optimize for the central value proposition of Inkhaven

For the month of November, we’re running a residency for talented writers to hone their craft by writing and publishing a blogpost every single day. We provide food and housing at-cost, so that you can focus on writing.

We’ll offer whatever we can to improve the writing experience and help the resident writers grow stronger. In fact, we’ve interviewed many successful writers about what’s helped them, and we’ll aim to offer many of the things they described, through mentorship opportunities from celebrated writers, craft-honing workshops, and professional feedback. But all that will be optional. Your commitments are simply to be here and write.

Bullshit. Writing was the most optional of all. Everything else they pushed us to do took away from time writing. There never was any counter-pressure, beyond the daily deadline.

You made your writing residency an environment optimized against writing.

You made it a one month LessOnline. I did not come for a conference. At least, LessOnline had Quiethaven, one hour where everyone was supposed to sit down and write. LessOnline was more optimized for writing than this writing residency.

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Yes I am bitter and cynical today.

Yes, I know I will look back on this month and have fond memories of all the fun I had and all the friends I made.

I get fond memories all the time. I was here to write. I wrote less in a month than I did in four days by myself.

If it stayed like that, I would not come to Inkhaven 2, and would advise people against coming.

I thought I would live the life of the writer.

I could not stop crying writing those words. I had not realized how disappointed I was in myself and in this system.

I hope Inkhaven 2 will be different.

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Below is the post I originally started to write. It has way more actionable advice about what to change. The rant came out of it, but I felt like the rant deserved to be first.

What I would change for Inkhaven 2

As a resident of Inkhaven, I achieved multiple of my goals I set out to do by the end of the program. I did publish way more than I ever did, I got better at writing quickly and accurately, and can now spin up a post in one go. I got many of my ideas out there, that I’ll be able to reference for a long time.

However, some things did not succeed as well.

The most flagrant one is that I came here with the intention of writing a sequence of posts on French AI Policy. I ended up writing only one of them. Clearly, part of the reason was that I had way less environmental incentive to write about it here, compared to when I’m in Paris, hanging out with other people thinking about this topic.

Still, I think the program could have done a better job of keeping me focused on long term goals, rather than just responding to the local incentives.

An general issue, which I also had in other programs like this (like MATS 6.0), is that I have immense difficulty with going to sit at a desk alone and work, when I’m in a place filled with friends and interesting people, with activities happening all the time.

Most of my time was spent in reactive mode, bouncing from activity to conversation, and passing through meals and reading resident’s posts. There was never a time where the world screamed at me IT IS NOW TIME TO SIT DOWN AND WRITE.

At LessOnline, the festival about blogging, we had an hour called Quiethaven, where all conversations stopped, and everyone stayed silent, so that we could all settle down and do some writing. Because, it’d be kinda sad to have a festival about blogging not have any part of blogging.

I would have liked to have Quiethaven at Inkhaven. Two hours every day, one before lunch, one before dinner. During those times, no conversations allowed, so everyone could settle in the flow of writing.

That would have led me to do at least 2h of writing per day. Most likely, it would have led to more than that, as once I get started, it gets easier to continue. The pain comes from stopping the conversations and settling down to work.

In practice, I did spend around one and a half hour writing per day, on average. I think it would still have helped, by making writing time happen much earlier, and giving me a baseline.

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Relatedly, I would also change the layout of the days. I would bring the publication deadline forward to 6pm, just before dinner, and keep only writing related activities during the afternoon. All social activities would be pushed back to the evening, where everyone would have already published.

Yesterday was representative of my trouble. I had not even started my piece at dinner, and dinner chained into a movie I really wanted to watch, then into authentic relating games, and there I was, at 11pm, starting to think about what my piece could be.

This was a terrible situation because it got me to go to sleep so late, having published in the last minutes before midnight.

In my fault analysis, the issue is more with getting pulled into conversations and activities during the day which pull me away from writing, rather than the deadline being at midnight. I had trouble publishing early in the first few days of November, but I quickly started publishing earlier as I got the hang of writing posts, and by the second week, I was publishing great work by dinner, having fun in the evening, and sleeping early and well. It all went downhill as soon as we started all knowing each other and wanting to hang out with each other. There was nothing preventing me from inexorably writing less and less during the day, the FOMO growing stronger as the potential friendships became more apparent.

The evening was the last remaining time where it felt “normal” to go write. The stress of the deadline helped for sure. I could see people saying they really have to go write as it’s already 10pm, which made it easy to follow them and go write myself. This never happened during the day anymore.

I would have benefited a lot from a strong social norm of the day before dinner being for writing. Two hours of Quiethaven breaking the rhythm of conversations would have helped a lot. I would also have liked all socialization before dinner to be restricted to the winner’s lounge, with the staff encouraging people deep in conversations to Aumann to go there, or go back to writing if they’ve not yet published.

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I didn’t like that the environment was adversarially optimized against focus.

The natural way to enter Lighthaven is through Aumann Hall. This was the place where socialization was happening all day. The default action when entering was to stop and talk. This could have been solved with the norm of socialization only being in the winner’s lounge before dinner.

Activities in the afternoon were specifically run next to the AB deck, in the courtyard or in Aumann, so people would notice the session was happening and be nudged toward joining it. I know you tried to solve the problem of no one knowing about the sessions Ben, but man that did destroy the rest of my capacity to get anything done in the afternoon.

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I didn’t like that there was only one feedback form at the end of the first week.

The end of the first week was the high point of my ability to write with focus during the day, publish by dinner, and have a piece I was proud of. It all went downhill from there, and there was no one to notice really. The first feedback form led to good discussions with my coach Vaniver, which in turn led me to great writing about stuff I cared about. A second one would have done the same.

Note that the other side of the medal is that second week was when I started to make friends. I said in the week 1 form that I did not feel connected to the other residents. By the end of week 2 that had changed, and that led me to the over socialization and under writing equilibria.