It’s day 21 of 30 days of daily blogging at the Inkhaven writing retreat.

The social accountability structure is doing an excellent job at causing me to actually write something every day. This kind of structure is rare and valuable; you can’t just go out and get 40 people to do a daily goal with you and mutually support each other. I’m glad I took advantage of it. I’m also quite glad that I’ll have a little portfolio of 30 blog posts, like a kind of souvenir. Probably the most useful thing I’ll have gotten out of it is the information of what it was like when I tried to write every day. I’m getting lots of rapid data about how easy it is, what topics I end up choosing, and how my writing responds to a forceful incentive to publish faster. Even if I stop daily blogging, I can use this bundle of experience as useful data when I want to plan future writing, or reflect on my relationship to writing.

That said, I think that by day 20 the marginal information accumulation has kind of petered out. I don’t feel strained for ideas or anything, so I’m pretty sure the next ten days could just go exactly like the last ten.

Given that, I’ve been experiencing an increasingly strong sense of “I don’t wanna” in relation to the task of writing a post each day. Now, this feeling on its own doesn’t necessarily mean much. It’s pretty common for highly skilled or productive individuals to report that their hesitation to wake up early, do the hard work, get on stage again, etc. never goes away, and the key to succeeding was to build a system (internally or externally) such that they do it anyway, despite that feeling. So it would be kinda lame if I let this sense of “I don’t wanna write a post today” affect me in and of itself.

But when I look into that feeling a bit, part of what’s happening is that the writing doesn’t feel as valuable as I thought it might be.

A lot of how I’ve been writing daily posts is by just lowering my standards. I haven’t written anything that I’m embarrassed about, and it’s not like I’m dumping stream-of-consciousness morning pages onto the internet. But the posts are… just fine? They’re essentially all notably worse versions of what I “could” have written if I’d spent more time on them. I would like them to be better fact-checked, and illustrated, and with much more care in the construction of the expression. I want to take more time to find the phrases that really hit with resonance. It may be that writing three of the worse posts is more valuable to readers than me spending three times as long to make the better version of one of them. But… I don’t really want to write the worse versions? That is not very satisfying to my inner craftsman.

As you can see, I’m still figuring out how I feel about this.

I’m also getting less feedback and positive reception than I expected. This could be just down to the fact that I am doing no promotion of my content whatsoever, but it’s still a negative update on the value of writing.

There’s also the bit where the activity of getting to know the other people in the Inkhaven cohort has been, thus far, a direct trade-off against writing. I’ve mostly prioritized writing (and my day job) and so I really haven’t gotten to know people. This program feels like exactly the kind where you unexpectedly life-long friends, so I’m kind of sad about having to write mediocre blog posts instead of doing that.