I agree that one post a day is unsustainable, unless you are either a miracle writer, or satisfied producing large quantities of low-quality text (which may or may not be a good business strategy) for the rest of your life.
From my perspective, it is more like an exercise to show you what’s possible. Once you spent a month writing one post per day, it will no longer feel unrealistic to commit to publishing one post per week (or two posts per week, if they are a significant source of your income, i.e. you don’t do it after a 40-hour job week).
It is also an exploration into how much your writing quality decreases when you increase the quantity. Maybe a lot, or maybe just a little. Perhaps it helps you get rid of some extra steps, which will make writing easier after you return to a more relaxed schedule.
I don’t remember the source, but I heard that when you train some ability that can be decomposed into multiple skills, it makes sense to train each skill separately, even if maximizing that specific skill temporarily makes the overall result worse. For example, if you want to learn to throw a ball into the basketball hoop, you can separately practice “throwing far enough” and “throwing at the correct angle”, and stop worrying for the moment that the balls that fly far enough are flying at a wrong angle, and the balls at the correct angle don’t fly far enough. Practice these two things separately, try to maximize each one; and later try to join them. From this perspective, you are currently training the ability to write a lot. You will integrate it with quality writing later.
Or to put it differently, your current failure mode is “writing a lot of mediocre stuff”, but your usual failure mode is “procrastinating on actually writing and publishing the post”. If you can’t overcome both failures at the same time, at least learn to overcome each one of them separately. Maybe one day it will click together.
blogging is typically a very personal expression of one’s soul and should not primarily be imitated.
Actually, I think it would be a very useful exercise to try to mirror each popular blogger’s style for one day. Like, spend one day trying to write an article in a way that will make everyone think that Scott Alexander wrote it. The next day, try to write like Zvi. Etc. Plus you have the advantage that if you get stuck with a question such as “okay, here is the place where they would insert some X or Y, but how would they find it?”, you can simply ask them.
People are confused about the original voice. It does not develop by carefully avoiding contamination. Actually, many “uncontaminated” writers sound quite similar to each other. Instead, the voice probably develops by trying many different things, and then keeping the subset that works for you. It is important to try more than one thing. If you only try to copy Scott Alexander, you will at best become a weaker copy of Scott. But if you copy Scott Alexander one day, and then maybe Ernest Hemingway the next day, and someone else yet another day… and you copy dozen authors like this… then afterwards, whatever mix remains, will probably seem quite original to most readers. If you want to push it further, try crazy exercises, such as avoiding adjectives, or trying to write the article backwards, etc.; again, the goal is not to keep writing like this, but to have it tried.
I think you should give yourself an artificial deadline of e.g. 5 PM, and spend the rest of the day watching others. (And maybe keep a notebook all the time, and note some ideas.)
I have a lot of interesting people about. Should I do interviews? Have them read their blogposts and discuss them? [...] Make a documentary?
Maybe, try each of that once? Or do it once, collect feedback, then do it the second time trying to incorporate all the feedback. (But don’t e.g. spend the entire month doing interviews, that would be a waste of time.)
Can I make more money with Inkhaven?
You could try to achieve sINKularity—a blog with paying subscribers that covers the costs of staying at Inkhaven.
This could either be done by individual participants (each participant starting their own blog), or collectively (the Inkhaven managers starting a blog, where the participants can contribute). The advantage of the individual blog is that the participants can take their source of income with them. The advantage of the collective blog would be more content; you could even split it to multiple blogs, by the type of content, e.g. one for fiction, etc.
Getting more painful & scary feedback from their peers
Getting more painful & scary feedback from established writers
Maybe the organizers could help with this by printing all the posts, giving everyone a copy of each, and a red pencil. The participants then wouldn’t have to approach everyone asking for feedback individually. They could also take the annotated papers home, and read them afterwards as a reminder.
I agree that one post a day is unsustainable, unless you are either a miracle writer, or satisfied producing large quantities of low-quality text (which may or may not be a good business strategy) for the rest of your life.
From my perspective, it is more like an exercise to show you what’s possible. Once you spent a month writing one post per day, it will no longer feel unrealistic to commit to publishing one post per week (or two posts per week, if they are a significant source of your income, i.e. you don’t do it after a 40-hour job week).
It is also an exploration into how much your writing quality decreases when you increase the quantity. Maybe a lot, or maybe just a little. Perhaps it helps you get rid of some extra steps, which will make writing easier after you return to a more relaxed schedule.
I don’t remember the source, but I heard that when you train some ability that can be decomposed into multiple skills, it makes sense to train each skill separately, even if maximizing that specific skill temporarily makes the overall result worse. For example, if you want to learn to throw a ball into the basketball hoop, you can separately practice “throwing far enough” and “throwing at the correct angle”, and stop worrying for the moment that the balls that fly far enough are flying at a wrong angle, and the balls at the correct angle don’t fly far enough. Practice these two things separately, try to maximize each one; and later try to join them. From this perspective, you are currently training the ability to write a lot. You will integrate it with quality writing later.
Or to put it differently, your current failure mode is “writing a lot of mediocre stuff”, but your usual failure mode is “procrastinating on actually writing and publishing the post”. If you can’t overcome both failures at the same time, at least learn to overcome each one of them separately. Maybe one day it will click together.
Actually, I think it would be a very useful exercise to try to mirror each popular blogger’s style for one day. Like, spend one day trying to write an article in a way that will make everyone think that Scott Alexander wrote it. The next day, try to write like Zvi. Etc. Plus you have the advantage that if you get stuck with a question such as “okay, here is the place where they would insert some X or Y, but how would they find it?”, you can simply ask them.
People are confused about the original voice. It does not develop by carefully avoiding contamination. Actually, many “uncontaminated” writers sound quite similar to each other. Instead, the voice probably develops by trying many different things, and then keeping the subset that works for you. It is important to try more than one thing. If you only try to copy Scott Alexander, you will at best become a weaker copy of Scott. But if you copy Scott Alexander one day, and then maybe Ernest Hemingway the next day, and someone else yet another day… and you copy dozen authors like this… then afterwards, whatever mix remains, will probably seem quite original to most readers. If you want to push it further, try crazy exercises, such as avoiding adjectives, or trying to write the article backwards, etc.; again, the goal is not to keep writing like this, but to have it tried.
I think you should give yourself an artificial deadline of e.g. 5 PM, and spend the rest of the day watching others. (And maybe keep a notebook all the time, and note some ideas.)
Maybe, try each of that once? Or do it once, collect feedback, then do it the second time trying to incorporate all the feedback. (But don’t e.g. spend the entire month doing interviews, that would be a waste of time.)
You could try to achieve sINKularity—a blog with paying subscribers that covers the costs of staying at Inkhaven.
This could either be done by individual participants (each participant starting their own blog), or collectively (the Inkhaven managers starting a blog, where the participants can contribute). The advantage of the individual blog is that the participants can take their source of income with them. The advantage of the collective blog would be more content; you could even split it to multiple blogs, by the type of content, e.g. one for fiction, etc.
Maybe the organizers could help with this by printing all the posts, giving everyone a copy of each, and a red pencil. The participants then wouldn’t have to approach everyone asking for feedback individually. They could also take the annotated papers home, and read them afterwards as a reminder.