Writing is a flywheel

500 words a week will be easy, they said

Flywheel, Ford Model A, August 1, 1933

Something that surprised me about Inkhaven was: it was easy to write. Really easy. I had assumed this would be the hard part. I sought advice from friends about this, getting them to assure me that I wouldn’t get kicked out. When I was there I spoke to another Inkhavenee about what it would be like to be the first person to ever get kicked out; we both agreed that throwing oneself off the Golden Gate Bridge would be the only fitting response.

Of course, in the literal sense writing 500 words is easy. There weren’t any restrictions on what you could write about, or on the quality of your writing. For the first week there wasn’t even a rule stopping you from posting raw LLM outputs… until that eventually was changed and the Inkhaven censors brought in a pre-submission Pangram check to weed out people who were posting slop. Round these parts, we write our own slop, like real writers.

Some skeptics saw the whole exercise as an incredibly poor reflection on the people who went – that they clearly lack free will for needing to attend such a thing. You can just pump out 500 words of whatever in the comfort of your own home!

Not so fast.

It’s actually remarkably hard to just write 500 words. It’s also hard to just write 500 words. Once you start, the words flow, but they aren’t very good, and so you spend 10% of the time doing 90% of the writing and then 90% of the time doing the remaining 10%, tweaking and editing and deciding it’s not good enough and deleting it and starting over. Being in a group of people who are all there to write makes it very difficult to just hand in garbage, and your standards increase as time goes on (and then they fall again, and then increase again at the end; it’s a perplexing experience). Some of the best writers were also the most prolific and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Now that I’m out of Inkhaven, a bunch of us are doing “Foreverhaven”, where we write one thing a week. Even this paltry output has been a struggle.

This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. I have a job now, and I’m not surrounded by brilliant people who have devoted a whole month to living together and writing daily (and my life is all the poorer for it). I leave writing til the Sunday night deadline, and though I have a dozen things to write about none of them grab my attention enough to develop fully in the limited time I have.

I’ve found that writing begets more writing, and once I start more ideas start to branch out of what I’m writing; writing is itself the vehicle for thinking and generating new ideas to write about – which is convenient, because while I’m generating the output I want, I’m also priming the pump for future writing, like if a power plant produced enriched uranium as a byproduct. Now that the flywheel has stopped turning it’s a huge effort to get it spinning again.