Inkhaven 2
A modest proposal
Today marks the end of Inkhaven. Many of us will keep publishing; some of us will stick around Lighthaven until the end of Solstice season. But some eyes are already on the horizon, thinking about what to do if we do this again; here’s my sketch.
Monk Mode
Monasteries have defined schedules (for example). Inkhaven 2 could have a schedule that residents vow to follow while attending, leaving if they break it too much. The Lark variant:
0800-0900: Silent Breakfast
0900-1200: Silent Writing
1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1600: Events, reading, listening.
1600-1800: Feedback circle
1800-1930: Dinner
1930-2100: Evening relaxation
2100-0800: Silence
Owls have the same schedule except that the silent writing time is 2100-2400 rather than 0900-1200, which allows both larks and owls to attend the same event without having too much conflict.
One day a week—traditionally Sunday, but perhaps Saturday instead?—is completely off, with everyone encouraged to leave the premises for at least an hour.
Why do this?
Input Measures
Inkhaven 1 had an output measure; people needed to publish 500 words a day, or they were out. But those words didn’t have to be any good; we were trusting on the pride of the participants to cause them to go above and beyond. (They did; the longest post was 10,250 words, and the median was 950 words.) At least one resident wrote some posts whose natural length was more like 400 words, and rather than being slimmed down for brevity the posts were fattened up to hit the minimum, which is not training good writing.1
An alternative is input measures. If people need to spend three hours applying butt to chair and hands to keyboard, then you’re training a different skill, but one that is still pretty useful. Residents will spend about the same amount of time writing as in Inkhaven 1—quite possibly more—but will likely focus on different sorts of projects. Short thoughts that are tossed out over the course of an hour will then sit and be revised. Long posts will slowly appear over the course of days.
The main thing that I’m uncertain about with this schedule is that it is opinionated on the split between reading and writing. The best writers and bloggers spend a large fraction of their time consuming text; is it really the case that people should be writing three hours a day, rather than writing two hours and getting another hour of reading in? There’s twelve hours of silence for sleeping and breakfast, which will presumably include quite a bit of reading in there.2 But it might make more sense to have dedicated reading blocks that are as central to the schedule as the writing blocks.
Opinionated Scheduling
We had advertised Inkhaven 1 as being very limited in its demands—beyond the requirement to publish, very little else that was mandatory—but this meant that we didn’t lean as much on supplemental activities as we could have. Writers workshops routinely force everyone to do feedback circles; people that showed up to feedback circles found them more useful than they expected, and also the demand to show up to feedback circles was quite low. Part of this was the timing; people weren’t as interested in feedback on published pieces, and they weren’t writing their pieces early enough to get feedback on them before publishing.
Now that we’ve run an Inkhaven, and have some sense of how it will go and what the options re, I think we have more opportunity to create and sell a specific vision of how residents will behave while at the workshop, and people not interested in that vision can elect to wait until a different Inkhaven that’s more to their tastes.
Synchronization
We had the publishing deadline at midnight, as the obvious time to separate days, with the outcome that many residents worked up until the final minutes and then published, and we never really got a cohesive evening culture together, because some people were relaxing, having already posted earlier in the day, while other people were knuckling down. Some people were sleeping in the mornings, having stayed up late, and then hanging out or attending sessions after lunch, and then writing after dinner; other people were doing the same things in different orders.
When everyone is on the same schedule, people naturally encourage each other to enter the flow, instead of pulling each other out of the flow. In particular, a vow of silence that begins in the evening is essentially a collective bargaining agreement that everyone can go to sleep at a sustainable, agreed-upon time, instead of each person deciding for themselves in the moment whether to keep talking and forging friendships, or abandon the others to go to sleep. The temptation is always to stay up just a bit later, paying costs later for benefits now.
This schedule gives people nine hours a day to talk with one another; more than enough time to become friends and stay socialized.
The Vaniverine Rule
I think the main hope that I would have is actually getting a Deep Work schedule going, for a set of people at once. I think the hope for Inkhaven was that residents could get used to being out there, to shipping things even if they’re not perfect yet, and having a sustained life of the mind, where blogs are not just a sometimes food but a daily fixture. For Inkhaven 2, my hope would be something like ‘authors’ instead of just ‘bloggers’; people who have a more vocational orientation towards the product of their thoughts, and who want to produce things that require more cultivation.
In retrospect, I wish we had looked at posts around the threshold length and figured out which ones were too short and which ones were ok; we might have decided that actually the minimum publishable unit was more like 300 words.
One thing that might be neat is to also be opinionated about devices here, maybe including getting people Kindles or similar so that they can still read digital content without being able to write it, during the times of ‘silence’.