All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.
–Paul Klee
What did I learn from writing every day for six months? Which aspects of writing got easier? Time to reflect on what was evergreen.
On Self-regurgitation
I would find the above painting menacing, except that most of Paul Klee’s paintings have an element of play inside them. I see a drawing of chortling figures on a spitroast, with barbed spikes coming out of their distorted tucan mouths.
This is what writing feels like for a lot of people. This is what writing feels like to me.
The visual arts were my first love; I was having too much pain from hand cramps and decided to switch to writing. Perhaps not a huge loss if both my love of reading and my ambitions to synthesize many different ideas may give me an edge in writing that I wouldn’t have with painting.
I entered a world of a different kind of pain common for those who see writing-as-art: the self-flagellating, self-crucifying scourge.
I had this kind of torment when I was painting, but I felt entitled to it. When I was writing I assumed that it had to be easier. Anybody can write, the way anybody can speak, and so why so much pain? Is my writing benefiting from it? This was a second layer of flagellation. But just as somebody can paint from a place of age-old ichor or Bob Ross up some lilypads, maybe the same variance is present in writing depending on the disposition of the person and on the task at hand. And sometimes just hanging out practicing lilypads with your music or your buddies is what you actually should be doing.
I applied to Inkhaven the first time because I was curious what mechanizing the process would feel like. What would happen if I put myself on this spitroast and let the crank turn? After all, most writers who are prolific say that they write every day, and most of them say that they go one step further and write at the same time. When I read books of writing advice, people I respect say that there is no escaping the full torment of writing, but you can make it easier by giving yourself a time and a place for it, and in your own personal transformation in consistent engagement with the craft, many aspects do get easier. The promise of the ease is hard to explain, but you will notice yourself transformed if you do it.
Writing every day for 30 days did transform me, and writing every day for 180 days did transform me further. My biggest transformations involved my relationship to my own loathing of my writing, and my energy management around that loathing. This led to continued transformations involving the love of my writing, and the love of the generator in myself from which that writing comes from. In feeling a deeper love of my own source, I was able to more authentically relate to other writers, alive and dead, and have more fun playing with craft.
Klee did catch me, in the end.
Everything written below was hard-won for me, but it may not match everybody’s way of working or match the kind of writing they are doing. I did not burn out, and after the 180 days continued writing weekly with more vigor than when I had started. These are tricks I learned along the way.
The most important thing I learned is that my feelings in the process of writing did not have any 1:1 mapping to my feelings months after the writing. In remembering and rereading something I had rewritten, often I found that I like it a lot more than I did in the rough process of creation. Perhaps I thought my idea was too flippant to write down, and I thought I did not give it enough attention. Or perhaps I slaved over a piece for weeks and still did not think I got it right. In both of these cases, whether it was emotional under investment or emotional overinvestment, myself as a future reader was often charitable, kind, and very pleasantly surprised. I would find my own past writing valuable to myself and my purposes, and I would get likes on random past pieces months later. If what I wrote captured my thoughts legibly and my emotions honestly, then these were sufficient pebbles for my future mind to follow along and enjoy the rereading.
The standard for if a joke in comedy is “good” is if it gets a laugh in the moment. In music if you want to listen again. For myself and for my writing, if I want to read it again, even if I catch edits I want to make.
On Saving Energy
This ended up being very important. If you are writing every day for six months, there will be many days when you are thinking about other things, doing other things, or otherwise can’t really write.
When I was writing every day for 30 days, I sort of hoped that I wouldn’t get sick on any of those days, and otherwise did not have a plan. When I was writing for six months, I had the opposite assumption. It was unlikely I would not get sick at all, and I would need a plan.
The strangest thing I learned was that it was easier to write when I myself was sick, than when somebody I really cared about was sick. When I myself am sick, I can still keep my attention on myself and on my thoughts for long enough to write a blog post that feels honest and true and worth reading, and to hit publish. When somebody else is sick, I would be much more likely to forget the daily writing goal entirely until my “don’t forget to write” alarm goes off, and then taking time to write would feel indulgent. My attention would simply be elsewhere.
When I was sick, I actually found that I could meander a bit, the goal being not to strain myself too much. When somebody else is sick is actually when I learned to write fast—go-go, done, back to whatever I was doing.
Here are the tricks I learned for saving energy, to make it in the long game:
Just write it down, without editing it in your brain
If writing is “saying something” then editing it right after you’d already said it means doing a lot more extra work. You can just write it down, and chances are it will come out as simple and coherent. Your brain has a very advanced capacity for self-organization, and you are likely already more organized than you think you are.
If you feel disorganized, chances are the thought is not as disorganized as your feelings surrounding whether you like the thought or not. In that case, still just write it down. You can write what already feels clear to you despite emotional confusion—this is likely to come out naturally and organized first, and quickly. Then, what is confusing will emerge organically, and you can save the confusing emotional crux for a Part II. “Leading the reader to the hard thing” is generally a kindness. In craft, it creates a good introduction to the hard thing and works as a friendly setup for why the hard thing matters. The reader would encounter this as helpful and good writing.
The act of writing itself helps you clarify what you want to say, and so spending the time clarifying, writing, is killing two birds with one stone.
Notice which part of the process you are in
If you are writing every day, spending too many cycles just to end up saying the same thing you wanted to say the first time means a lot of extra energy is used up.
My first time at Inkhaven, I wanted to spend a lot of time socializing, and so I knew that I would have to figure out how to reduce redundant time use, or else burn out. This continued to be important in the marathon-writing as well because I was still working my job and doing other things.
One major way to reduce redundancy is to separate the “just write it down” and the “I’ll edit this” stages of writing into two very distinct stages in your workflow. Two stages may seem like a lot, compared to one fused stage, but the total of two stages is a lot fewer than the potentially ten stages you would have if you were editing it and recursing on the writing in your mind.
I do believe that recursion often makes writing better—whether it’s another editing pass or another pass at deeper thinking. But I would make those recursion stages their own special stages.
There is a downside of this certain very specific goopy mind-recursion, which is that your brain tends to be pretty organized, and in running this process you may accidentally make it less organized.
I consider this different from “figuring out what you want to say” which usually involves stewing on something for a while in an extremely nonlinear fashion.
Noticing which stage of the process you are lets you have the most indulgent fun in that actual process, without the constraints of another part of the process creeping in, and keeps you organized.
At Inkhaven1, I wrote my ideas on a piece of papyrus, free wrote on the typewriter in the morning, and then in the evening I edited my writing on the computer. Thus, the stages were separated both in the equipment that was used, and separated in time.
Write about what you are already thinking about
On some days when I didn’t feel like writing anything at all, and then when I thought about why, it was because I was saturated. Something happened that day, or I was making plans to do something, or I was overwhelmed, or I had feelings I needed to process. Context switching into a “writing mode” would feel too energetically expensive, like switching off entire modes of being to upload another just to get my writing done. This context-switching would use up a lot of energy, so I started writing what I was overloaded with. I was surprised that there generally was some angle on what I was thinking about that would appeal to an audience, and that doing this generalization to other people made me feel less overwhelmed about whatever I was thinking about.
One of my favorite things about having written every day was the feeling of surprise at how many things would simply not have been written ever because I did not want to write.
The constraint of needing to write that day, and not for example writing two posts the next day if I missed a day, meant that I ended up just writing down the most interesting thing that happened that day. This post about visiting the largest glass museum in the world would never have been written, if I didn’t have to write that day. I was really tired.
When I reread it, I was struck; the entire week after that visit was extremely chaotic, and involved multiple people and several relocations. I was pleasantly glad that the fragility of my glass post was not broken by the turbulence of my ensuing emotional world, but rather was safely preserved.
Travel writing or adventure writing was not my current genre, but if you keep an open mind to genre, then the things that are happening to you are a wonderful cauldron of ideas.
You may think that this is “cheating” but I promise you will forget about the cool thing that happened that exact day, and never write about it ever again, and it will never be written. The only way you will remember it again is by looking at your old writing.
Later in my 180 day journey, I started recording conversations too. When I wrote this piece theorizing why people say they have “average friendships,” the most interesting that I was thinking about was a conversation I had the day before. This piece about cooking with wine straight up included copy-pasted texts from a friend I wanted to remember.
In the fastest blogpost I have ever written (9 minutes) I straight up talk about my philosophy that if you are hard-pressed to find something to write about, you can look to your groupchats, or your diary, or wherever it is that your alive thing with other people happens to naturally occur.
I have found that people do like the, “where did you go,” “what happened,” “what did they say” posts, especially when they are well-written with an eye towards legibility and meaning to the reader. The reader gets to learn about another person’s subjective world, and how another person relates to shared reality.
The way to get comfortable with this kind of writing is by putting the reps in, and the way to get the reps in is by not shying away from it when the muse flies by. A lot of people explicitly practice this kind of writing even when there is no muse, and so putting in the reps when it occurs to you to do so would not be indulgently overdoing it.
On Hating Your Own Writing
There will be moments in writing every day when you hate your own writing and think the entire endeavor is a waste of time.
I consider this a separate set of questions from saving energy, though this is a major way that energy gets spent.
You can still write, and produce really terrific writing, even when your heart is not fully into it, if you are organized and trust your processes.
Protecting your ideas
You are allowed to despair, and you are allowed to despair a lot. That being said, your ideas should be protected from your despair.
Have a container that you like, that makes you feel cozy and safe, where you put different things like your ideas, snippets of conversations, sudden bursts of inspiration, where they get saved and undamaged that you trust, and know where to go to check when you need that type of object.
For some people it’s just the default notes app in their phone. Some people really hate that user interface. Maybe for you it will be a notebook, or an email thread to yourself. The important thing is that you know where you will check when you want to look for your ideas cauldron.
Penholder Friction
Relatedly, when you are ready to write, you want to make sure that you have a pen—whatever your version of a pen is.
Nobody likes that feeling of being really excited to write something down, but not having a pen.
Everybody knows that if there is a pen-holder in a house, the pen-holder seldom moves. It is kind of heavy and nobody ever has a real reason to move it. And everybody knows the disappointment of needing a pen, diligently going to the pen-holder, and noticing there are no pens. Or that there are many pens, but none of them work.
These are the feelings that you are trying to avoid. You want to go to the pen-holder, see pens you like, take the pens you like, and feel good about the entire process. You want to reduce “pen-holder friction” where it is not necessary.
You want to follow the fun. The things that feel like they are fun, or that they feel like they are working, or that do not feel like work — that’s what you want to be doing more of. When it feels fun and joyful and unhinged and unfiltered and relaxing — these are good feelings! You want to be feeling that. This is important for anything long-term. Trust your own inner critic and your own inner project manager — trust that they will still be there even when you are not looking at them, and they will come out and say stuff to you when they feel like it. These are not particularly self-filtering or self-isolating parts of your psyche. They will come out and have meetings with you. Don’t feel like if they aren’t looking over your shoulder for a while, that this means you are doing something wrong. Probably it means they trust you to do something right without supervision.
Knowing where your pen is means that you can follow the flow right when you feel it without any additional friction.
On Metaposts
Most people have an idea of what kind of writing counts and what kind of writing does not count. This varies by person!
For some people, only highly technical writing that they consider research is what counts, and fiction is fun and flippant. For some people, fiction and poetry is what counts as real art from the soul and all other writing is merely mechanical. For some people, only writing truthfully about things that really happened is real writing, and all other writing is fun silliness.
Given how much these feelings about what is real writing and real art and real work depend on genre, one way to soften the feelings is to fiddle with genre and become more versatile. If some of the genres aren’t “real” to you, then you can treat them as a sandbox. It means you can practice, mess up, and get feedback in a low stakes environment, while improving your writing craft for the kind of writing that matters to you.
Sometimes what feels like fun is a metapost, and then you feel shame that you feel so moved to write something in this lower genre. Why am I writing about writing? Why am I writing about my time at Inkhaven?
I would stop feeling the shame. Often these posts end up being treasures, and actually do not end up getting written “later.” If you aren’t happy with your volume of metaposts, you can do one of two things:
Write about whatever was happening that led to your feeling of excitement to write this metapost. Maybe it was a cool conversation, or a cool walk, or maybe you went to a conference and on coming back are reflecting on writing. Explicitly spelling out what was going on can make this metapost more interesting, and have more very specific details about your environment that can be very interesting later!
Commit to doing 1, and just split them up into two posts. Write a post about whatever felt immediately pressing or inspiring or burdensome that led to the metapost, as one post, and then write the metapost without much of an eye for craft. This way, you do not have to feel embarrassed about “wasting” a post on a metapost.
Commit to writing two posts every time you do a metapost, about whatever you want, and don’t worry about trying to make the metapost good. If you are embarrassed about it as a genre of “not real writing,” do write it, sloppily, whenever you feel the inspiration, but also write something else. If you don’t have inspiration, write about the last book or movie you liked, or the last event you went to that was interesting. The idea is if you are embarrassed about your metapost genre writing, use it as a reason to practice disciplined craftsmanly genre writing for a genre you want to practice more, and maintain your internal self-respect.
Whichever route you choose, the point is that shame is heavy, and if you are not writing from your place of shame, it is not helpful to good writing. Writing through the shame can be a lot more productive. And so if a metapost shines brightly through you, write the thing! Get it out! And then if you have shame around such feelings, use another strategy above and move along! But don’t let the shame either stop you from writing what you want, or become stuck inside you such that you don’t end up writing other things either.
Use Images if They Help
Sometimes you don’t care about the blog looking pretty—you only care about the writing. Even in cases like this, you might be blocked up because the page layout for your writing feels wrong. You just hate something about it, and it breaks your flow, even if you know what you want to write and feel coherent and streamlined in your process.
I changed my background color here on Substack a month after Inkhaven ended. I should have done this earlier. I prefer writing on a dark background, and this change takes about 2 minutes.
This post started off by having a lot of bullet points. I realized I hated that. Then I changed it to have these headings, which felt better, but the separation I wanted from the bullet points vanished. That’s when I thought to include the small illustrations. They broke up the piece visually in a way that was making sense to me as I was writing it.
The images kept me in flow. At first it broke my flow, with the penholder friction (“how am I going to make my diagrams?”) but I did have a marker and a notebook nearby, and I just took a picture immediately after I drew each diagram in a signal chat with a friend, then dropped it in here, and kept writing. Done.
It has never been easier to add little doodles. If you get the feeling “Ugh there maybe should be a drawing or a diagram here—that’s how I have it in my head, but I have to keep writing,” it has never been easier to stop writing, put it in, and keep writing. If you do this a lot, it might be very beneficial to consider the image incorporation as a part of the writing flow, to be integrated and iteratively improved on as part of your writing process, rather than something separate.
The point of a small picture or a diagram can also be to serve as the transition you actually have in your head. It can be a way to make a section feel more complete emotionally, when the writing is already decent and clear. Sometimes what you are doing is fiddling with your own emotions about the mind-feel of a section rather than requiring any new transition on the sentence-level.
A transition may feel incomplete to you, as the writer, while being perfectly clear to the reader. Note that professional editors often edit out overly elaborate transitions.
What Did I Learn in 180 Days that I Didn’t Learn in 30 days?
This is the real question. Did I gain anything continuing my daily writing after Inkhaven, or were most of the gains in the first 30 days?
The most important new thing I learned in 180 days is that writing is seasonal.
I liked writing before Inkhaven, and I knew I would continue to like writing after Inkhaven. I used my time at Inkhaven to try to optimize some of my processes for writing (I had never written every single day before) and get over emotional blocks surrounding my process of writing. After Inkhaven I continued to revise these processes and check how they worked in various different circumstances. I wrote in clubs, in cars, in airports, to get my daily blogpost in, and I learned not to be strained with it, while putting as much love and care into it as I could find in myself. One of my favorite pieces, “Ask Dynamical Systems Questions, Get Dynamical Systems Answers,” I wrote after spending four hours hanging out chilling in a hospital.
The longer timeline let me look at my past writing without remembering what it was like to write it. What I have to look at is what I left for myself to look at in the writing. Too much would have happened emotionally for me to go back to where I was emotionally when I wrote the piece, unless those emotions were themselves captured in the piece.
Some things I really cared about for a long time, and kept writing about for a long time, but then 5 months later if you asked me if this is something I want to write about, today, I would say no. I can care a lot about something and write very diligently about it, but after I have written about it, apart from editing, not have a need to write more.
Similarly, some topics only feel exciting for a day or two. Noticing these patterns allowed me to let go of judgment about my writing. I care a lot about reading, and looking at art, to continue to have inputs that I consider beautiful artistically or mathematically, or both. These inputs help me form judgments about my writing. But otherwise, the waves of inspiration work in mysterious ways, and sometimes I just want to write something one day because I want to write that thing that day, and I will never want to write it ever again.
Rather than considering that specific writing as “fake” or “not real” for its ephemerality of feeling, I consider it special to capture the feeling, if I am so called to want to capture it. (Even if the capturing is motivated by needing to write something that day, if this is the most interesting thing I am called to write about in a 24-hour period, this can still be special.)
I will not know if I like it or not, or if it survives a quality test of if I care about it later, until much later comes and I glance at it, and notice if I care about it or not anymore. I have surprised myself. Sometimes something about it catches me, and I make some edits to it because I do still care about it. Sometimes my own writing feels foreign to me. Sometimes I do not think the writing is good, but writing it was important because it transformed me in the process of writing. It can be hard or impossible in the moment of writing to tell which it will be.
Six months did not teach me which of my writing would last. But it did make me a better writer. And it taught me that I can’t tell which writing will stand the test of time even for myself. I did notice that doing my best, and putting in more detail, and being clear and honest did help in making the writing something I liked six months later. The effort does matter.
I do often write for my future self, but in the moment I do not actually know what my future self will like, and in the moment of writing I do not like either the idea or the execution fully, but I like something about both that I try to lean into. I consider the writing I do on this blog as writing for my friends, writing for friendly strangers, and writing for an anonymous public. I also consider it leaving pebbles for my future self of things that I had cared about enough to write about. And I care enough about my future self to keep making my best attempts to show her that her past self cared about things she should also care about, and to try for her sake to write about them legibly and beautifully.