When I wrote the first Inkhaven retrospective, I had an inkling that I would do it again, though didn't have any idea how large my role would end up being. I was on the team running things this time, and helped to comb through the pretty sizeable pool of applicants to narrow it down to 55 residents. Then when the thing actually began, I was incredibly busy. Last time, I thought I was very productive and in high gear, and it turns out that there's an even higher gear available to me, if I want to get close to the brink. I had two nametags this time, one that labeled me "Team" and one that labeled me "Writing Advisor", and I'm more interested in talking about the second role.
I gave feedback on somewhere north of a hundred posts over the course of the month, maybe as high as a hundred and fifty. The length of these varied, but most were around 2,000 words, since people tended to bring longer pieces for feedback. So my guess is that I read ~300,000 words over the course of a month, and I know from having compiled Slack logs that I wrote around ~25,000 words of feedback.
300,000 words is actually not that much reading for a month, but giving feedback means reading slowly and deeply, then doing actual thinking about what works and what doesn't, then articulating that in a way that will actually get across how to make the thing stronger. And there's a lot of context switching! The nature of the cohort meant that I was switching from an explainer, to a memoir, to fiction, to humor, and though my brain is good for many things, rapidly switching between topics with no real connection between them is not my forte. Toward the end there was a worrying cognitive clunk that happened, and I just powered through, but I couldn't have made it another week.
For all that, I found it very rewarding. The thing that I love most about writing is that moment when I solve a little puzzle, and that's a thing that sitting down to give feedback represented. Being able to say "cut this opening by a paragraph and it'll be stronger" or "you shouldn't end this post with a bunch of hedges, you should incorporate them into the main body in affirmative ways rather than defensive ways" feels really good. That's especially the case when the person who wrote the thing immediately says, "Oh wow, you're totally right, I see that now". I love a tight reward loop like that with instant gratification. There was one particular night when I was pretty exhausted and then got handed three things in a row, and it was like I was seeing the Matrix, giving editorial suggestions without even really having some active thoughts. I like to think that I leveled up while I was there, though it's probably only in this one particular skill, which will atrophy from disuse.
I felt very old while I was there. I recently turned 40, and have been feeling it, realizing how many of my references are now out of date, and how behind I am on slang and humor. No one says "cool beans" anymore, not even ironically. And there were a bunch of zoomers at this thing, maybe as many as half of them, though I never got any data on ages. So there was a feeling, sometimes, that I was helping out very young people in the infancy of their writing, people who would surely surpass me. Maybe because I'm a dad, I felt some paternalism toward these young adults that had to be pushed to one side, because I do think that if you're e.g. eighteen years old you should be treated like an adult by the people in your life and taken seriously, particularly in the creative arts, where you actually can produce an absolute banger at twenty years old. Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane at 25, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18, you really don't have to have lived that long to have something worth saying, and you can pick up enough craft skills when you're a teenager, at least for writing. But it was my first real interaction with zoomers outside of moderating some online spaces, and I was walking on unfamiliar ground, and it was sometimes disorienting.
Of course, the group of people who apply to a month-long blogging residency are going to be extremely unrepresentative, and the selection process skewed things even more. It was an eclectic bunch, and that was part of the joy of it. But it did also mean that I was operating in many different modes all the time, not just in what the best feedback for each of the posts would be, but what would be best for each of the writers. I have my bag of tricks as an advisor, but both story structure and voice/register were two of the things that I found myself reaching for most often. There's a way of developing your skill as a writer where you get into a groove that feels good, and individual sentences are great, but it takes a different kind of muscle to shape a piece as a whole. I'm definitely a holistic writer in that way, at least by inclination if not in practice. (There were also some evergreen pieces of writing advice I kept giving out, which are less notable or interesting: hedge less, open strong with a promise to the reader, end on a good final note, don't undercut your own point by answering imagined angry comments, push the unique and specific.)
I hope that I helped some people, or at least some posts, and that was mostly what attracted me to coming there in the first place. Whatever the stress and strain I was under, the outcomes seem positive to me, even if it meant that I was mostly not working on my own stuff. I did end up writing ~40,000 words while I was there between blog posts, chapters of serials, and some short fiction, often as a way to blow off stress, but I'd accepted going in that I'd have no particular writing goals of my own for the month.
As with last time, I want to highlight a few of my favorite pieces from the residents:
Kill Yourself Cave by gazemaizeisdead
You suck at dating apps because you're straight by viv
Don't screw the crew by Aliveness Studies
Kamikaze Dreaming by Drew Schorno
Not the Words of One Who Kneels by Thessaly Blue
You can read more writing from the residents here, I read ~1/5th of the output of Inkhaven 2, but didn't have the mental fortitude required to read every single piece every single day.
If you're interested in being a resident for a potential third Inkhaven, you can register that interest here.
