Tools at Inkhaven, Ranked by Usefulness

One of the things that this program provided was a lot of cool tools. Some of the tools are a little expensive and inconvenient to get for yourself because you can’t just order them on Amazon and they may require servicing. The IBM Selectric II typewriter is one such tool. Then there are nice keyboards and nice fountain pens and papyrus and white boards and post-it notes which can be attained pretty easily, and so if I found them useful and want them later I can buy them easily.

I’ve had intense bursts of inspiration around the tools. There were these jumbo sheets of paper that were twice as large as normal ones (the short side is the same size as a normal paper’s long side) which trick you into wanting to fill up an entire two pages on the typewriter when you’re typing (assuming you have the same impulse that I do for wanting to fill up an entire page). There was a mechanical keyboard that made my computer feel a lot more like a typewriter, in that there was no mouse or trackpad nearby which meant that editing was too inconvenient to be an option, and I’d just write straight without going back and rearranging anything or fixing typos. There were these cabins filled with white board walls you could just stay in while you write out your ideas in 3Dimensional space all around you. And then…there were the social tools.

For me, the main point of the physical tools was either to relinquish feelings of control and doubt by committing to the process of using a tool, rather than an outcome of the writing, or in breaking up the process of writing into several other staged processes, the way you can break down cooking a meal into several other staged processes.

Here is a ranking of the writing tools at Inkhaven!

Other Smart People in the Room Doing the Same Thing

The organizers were right about the hypothesis. Seeing 39 other people of various stages in their careers and various levels of experience all having a hard time at Inkhaven really does drive home that there is something hard about writing. Perhaps not uniquely hard compared to other fields, but at least not immune from every single hardship of every other field. It’s not all in your head and you’re not just broken. The “it should just be easy” feeling can’t be the real and obvious status quo that you are fucking up when you see so many other super smart, competent, put-together people of all ages also have the same kinds of fatigue, crises, and doubts as you are having. It helps that they are attractive.

The social scene here was one of the best and most fascinating I have seen in years. People actually start conversations with “what are you writing” or “what are you writing today” or “have you published?” The daily publishing actually was the main focal point of socialization between strangers. It was beautiful.

The writing actually does have painful parts to it; this was shown to be true. That doesn’t mean the pain is the whole process. Just because there is pain that you “have to endure to get to the good stuff” doesn’t mean that the pain that does exist shouldn’t be diminished just because it’s inevitable. In fact, people who have stamina find ways to make the hard stuff pretty good for themselves.​ I’ve seen people buy gloves to keep their hands warm, use multiple monitors, have special mice and keyboards, have special rooms for privacy, have special spots on the couch, special snacks. A lot of different people in the room doing the writing and taking care of themselves in their own unique ways was a very nice thing to get to watch. Just because writing is something somebody *could* do with just a pen and a paper, or just their laptop, doesn’t mean they have to, just as a skilled musician *could* make a bad guitar sound good, but that doesn’t mean she should if there are alternatives.

The Midnight Deadline

There may be a feeling of shame around the writing being bad, but there is an even greater feeling of shame around straight-up not writing anything, missing the midnight deadline, being the first one “out” and having to make the organizers actually sit down at a team meeting to figure out what “being kicked out” actually entails.

Do you have a binder of bad ideas? Some half-finished drafts? Something that needs a bit more editing? One of these objects is getting freshened up to be published today, because whatever shame you have about your half-baked thoughts actually seeing the light of day and being reviewed by another person, the alternative shame of NOT doing that is much worse. The way to get ostracized from this tribe is not by shipping something bad, but by not shipping anything at all.

The midnight deadline means you can finish early and start early if you wanted to, or let a little bit of delirium start to kick in such that your harshest critic inside you gets silenced.

Guilt

With shame, and without the midnight deadline, you care too much about what people think and you don’t even get started. Guilt meanwhile is a useful tool! That wishful part seeking redemption is what creates patterns for punishing yourself, arcs of despair and reach that make good art, and this leads to more writing and more writing from inside of yourself. The guilt actually leads you to have blinders on what people think socially speaking and so serves as an antidote to shame, and leads you to find more understanding about any specific problem you might have as you dig deeper into it, rather than trying to dissipate it so that nobody ever notices it ever existed.

The Month-long Commitment

The organizers had a hypothesis that writing every day could make people become better writers. I did become a better writer from the act of writing every day for a month, the act of consistency itself did create a change. I did become a better writer through the process of writing a lot and then getting occasional feedback. It meant that any emotions that came up that made this feel unsustainable had to be worked through, rather than remaining a ballast on my possible work output.

The IBM Selectric II Typewriter

Writing in the morning actually is useful. Writing, not editing. A coach here suggested to me that I do social defragmentation on the page in the morning, on the typewriter when I wake up, instead of on my phone thinking and responding to texts, as a way of orienting myself back into the world after sleeping. What would authentic morning social defragmentation on the page look like? Will it actually work well, or mess me up in some strange way?

One of the questions there was is that the morning social defragmentation at the typewriter actually does have to be honest. I cannot sit down and write about something I do not actually want to be writing about in that morning process, because then I will not be able to write at all. Something in my brain that is there post-dreaming will still try to poke and demand attention, and ignoring it would mean that I am working against something inside myself. The thoughts I write down in the morning actually have to be what is in my brain, either because that is what is good, or because it is bad but it has to not stay in my brain anymore. Either way, putting it in the typewriter means it comes out.

What is great about sitting at the typewriter is you can’t edit anything. You can’t go back. You just have to go linearly forward, until you don’t have anything more to say. There is also nothing else to do on the typewriter other than just write. If you are sitting there with a coffee, you know when you are typing (the typewriter makes a rhythmic noise) and when you are not typing (there are no sounds) and so you know if you are “actually writing or not.” The point is to keep your hands moving, but then the typewriter does not judge what you produce. The fact of the clicking is the only judge.

The typewriter has been very helpful in separating the writing stage of the process from the editing stage by allocating different tools to each stage.

Giant Easel Pad Post-It paper

I learned that some people really do thrive when there are tools around for their creativity. You do find ways to use them in different ways, when they around and you are stuck in some funny part of the process. You might think that for yourself all you need is a pen and a body, your own mind and your own wisdom, like athletics — all you need is your own body, your own mind, and your own will. This is true, but like athletics, you might need shoes that fit you; that actually does help with your performance indeed.​

There is a fantasy that if you were good enough you can outrun not having the right tools. You can just magician your way to success. But a super‑professional musician does sound a lot better on a really good violin than a really bad one, and this matters when the goal is to make beautiful music that other people like listening to rather than proving your intrinsic skill that you can use any violin or whatever.​

Handicaps aren’t super sexy. I had a period where I was eating bagels a lot, and some nice people reminded me that if I am gluten intolerant, writing blogposts while being mildly invisibly inflamed in every organ isn’t some kind of sexy showing off and isn’t going to make me a hero. People are just going to wonder why I’m doing that to myself and why I seem slightly off.

How I’ve used the tools: I do know that there will be a stage where I’m best off collecting a huge amount of output first then more or less fixing it later through editing. I do this on the typewriter, and then I take a picture and scan the text into the computer. But it can also help to “add more stages” through different tools as a way to recurse on the content, think deeper on some parts, go into emotions more, and for things like this. “Doing more recursion” can be tricky to think about but “adding more stages that encourage recursion” is a lot easier.

The giant Easel-Pad Post-It Paper is useful for this, or a white board. You can draw feelings and content bubbles there, draw arrows, actually draw arrows in shapes that encourage recursive thinking to improve your content. What feelings-bubbles come up and how do they connect and which connections could use more examples and explanations?

Binder From CVS

Lots of stuff you write is going to sound cliché or obvious to you in the moment, but a lot of the professional writers told us to “write what is obvious.” Therefore it is important to save ideas, and save notes, just as a matter of practice, and not because emotionally you think your work is gold that needs to be saved. It should be habit, the parts of cooking that are shopping for groceries, putting stuff into the refrigerator, washing the pots and pans. When you write, you take out your tools, your drafts and your notes are your mis-en-place. And then you get to work. But you have to put your ideas in the fridge.

I’d noticed that I didn’t have a place for my typewritten notes. I would type them, and realize I’m leaving them around the various tables. I’d start writing my name at the top of them, but I realized that as the pages piled up, it didn’t matter my feelings about them; I just had to put them in some kind of binder. And so I went to CVS and got a soft-covered one and that was the end of that. All my typewritten notes went in there, like groceries into a fridge. Later I would organize them, by whether they have become drafts already or if they still only exist in note-form.

Your feelings are already clichéd. They are going to feel cliché to you in the moment, but that doesn’t mean that future you won’t appreciate the work, or that past you wouldn’t have found this future you writing super insightful.

Spending a lot of time “trying not to have clichéd feelings isn’t super helpful. I discovered this phenomenon because friends would remind me that I haven’t written some blogpost yet that they were excited about, after I would think that maybe they’d gotten bored of the idea because it’s too familiar to me. Another instance is that I would write about friends who are visiting me and the conversations we have had, because I am on a deadline and need something to write about and our interesting conversations are top-of mind, but then this would feel like a cop-out. After they have left for a week, I would be glad that I wrote about them because when will that expected possible opportunity arise again? And then when will that conversation ever come up again? I may not see them for a few months and then the conversation will be completely different.

There is also no shame about writing about writing, or writing about shame or writing about the process. I used to think writing like this was not “real” writing, but if it is authentic and coming out of your head, into the typewriter it must go. Instead of having that feeling of shame, it’s better to get that writing about writing out, because very soon you will be writing about something else anyway! Might as well have that pathway between right now and writing about something else be as cleared as possible. And then when people ask you about your writing process, you wouldn’t have to start from scratch, you would have those old notes from when you were in the middle of it, writing about it, and that can be very precious to somebody.

My Internal Brain Cache

It does help to write what you are already thinking about, rather than restocking what you are thinking about to think about a completely different thing. For example, fiction writers, when they are writing, are already thinking about the last chapter they wrote and wondering for themselves what happens next in their world; they don’t wake up every day and start rebuilding a whole new world in their brain. They are already thinking about what they wrote about yesterday because they are still curious about it and want to know what happens next. This means that for some time, perhaps you are writing about some things that you are a little bit embarrassed about, perhaps some personal topic or some topic that you are a bit bored with, or some topic where you are writing about some existential crisis or you are writing about writing; however, the topic doesn’t matter so much as the habit of writing something because eventually you will get into that cadence of being genuinely curious. It’s like working out. The first two weeks back into it are going to be weird because your muscles are getting used to it again. ​

It is hard to know which of your stuff will be useful, or which section of any specific article would be useful. You can write the whole thing as you envision it, following your own standards, and then some part of it registers nicely to another person that you wouldn’t expect. For example, in one post about podcasting I wrote a list of tips, and then one description elucidating one of the tips, and not the whole tip itself, was super useful to one specific person going on a podcast. But I would not have written either that tip or that specific description without writing the whole article, in the same way that a scene in a movie can be super memorable to somebody, but that scene would never have been made without the whole movie.

All the Social Activities

You write a little bit, and then you can stop and hang out with people. The writing ends up being like a jigsaw puzzle on the table. You can pass it in different moods and see things from different angles. “Oh, I see this goes here now. Oh, I inserted a big clump in here while sleepy, now that I’m awake this is super useful. Your mood is at different times of the day, and you’re going to encounter the problem multiple times.

Because the writing has pain involved, the pleasurable parts do need to be indulged. Going on a walk and fully enjoying the views, really liking your coffee — there are other areas where you will be extremely self-conscious, and the specific oolong tea should be a place where you go into full bliss.