meet quota first
Check out Lucie's Inkhaven meta commentary from three ideas: inkhaven is too easy, losing the thread of intentionality, and not missing people:
Inkhaven residents are not exploring enough. One reason is that they are super stressed about not being able to publish their post for the day, and so they work until super late and only publish just before midnight, and it’s pretty sad, because they never ask advice from the advisor. They could ask Alexander Wales to review their first fiction, or SMTM to help them run their first experiment! But instead, they just publish ML Dev log #26 or yet another explanation of cat girl looksmaxxing.
What if residents started their day with cranking out their post, just like she did before the deadline:
Wowzers! It’s 11:49 and I’ve not yet published anything today! Better write fast, because the Inkhaven deadline is coming soon. No time to stop, no time to edit, just pure thought on the page.
Her mindset reminds me of Morning Pages from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: three pages of stream-of-consciousness journaling done first thing in the morning.
How would front-loaded, unpolished approaches like the above assist residents with exploring more, though? Meeting 500+ word quotas as early as possible minimizes deadline stress. Worst case scenario: all that's left is publishing the post. It also maximizes windows for in-person socializing with advisors, fellow residents, and more. They may as well take advantage of that crucial edge not found as readily in online equivalents. The resultant socializing can inspire edits to their existing work. Compare that to the dread of staring at a blank slate so late in the day. I would imagine that cycling through socializing and editing affords a much higher chance of not only surpassing personal writing standards, but engendering meaningful community interactions. Residents attend Inkhaven for an entire month. They may as well make it memorable beyond overlong rumination and stressed cramming.
Lucie said that residents never ask advice from an advisor. That doesn't even touch on how they could ask for advice from multiple advisors.
Knowing that many of my readers also write through blogs themselves, those revelations inspires a number of questions:
- Do you have advisors that you ask for writing advice?
- Are those advisors humans, generative AI, or both?
- Do you advise other writers?
- How do your answers to the above compare to the advice you give, receive, or lack in your career or other hobbies?