Two and a half years out, my writing has started to stall.

There are only so many big ideas one can develop to the degree that they can be written about, after all, and I’m starting to feel like the well is running a bit dry. The fundamental, base fear is probably something like imposter syndrome—I won’t be able to meet a deadline and everyone will figure out that I am actually not all that smart. It’s only been superficial nonsense this entire time.

Or, worse, no one notices.

And so here, on the study/flimsy porch of a cabin in the Maryland woods, bathed in the too-white light, occasionally occluded by shockingly large insects, watching the weather roll across the sky, I write.

Longhand, of course. I’ve always felt more comfortable with it, something more immediate and less permanent about setting pen to paper. Something which focuses the mind. Computers distract. If you can’t think of the next word, the entire corpus of human knowledge and funny GIFs are there instead. No need to stare at the horrible blankness of the page, to wrestle your thoughts into intelligible ink.

There is nothing more useless than writing. Oh, I know that the fourth estate (those not yet replaced by “AI”, anyway) tells us of the glory days when the pen prevailed against the sword. It’s a lie, a memory erected to keep the living fortified against despair.

In ancient Ireland, the poets insisted there was no fate worse than being the subject of a satire. A satire could uncrown kings and reduce heroes to mice. According to the poets, anyway.

Historical writing is often—almost always, if we’re truthful—a particularly useless form of writing. On the scale of the global population, so few have read an actual academic history so as to be a simple rounding error. Even the most well-sold “popular” histories are relative duds when placed against the number of copies sold by even the most aggressively mediocre young adult author. As an endeavor, it’s pointless.

Except for one thing: I don’t know what anyone else in ancient Ireland thought about the power of satire except the poets. They’re the ones who wrote it down, after all, and writing is the only way that the dead can speak to living humans. Well, I suppose in the last two centuries, we’ve tried to create a couple of others, but they all require the intercessory aid of the electron, a technology whose accessibility is not a given.

When studying history, we speak to the dead; when we write it, we speak for them. And we, the dead, also hope to speak to the quick, to those faces, desires, minds we will never know. We listen to the void in order to shout into it.

If at this point you’re hoping for a grand, unifying, comforting conclusion, you’re out of luck. As I’ve already told you, there are only so many big ideas one can develop to the degree they can be written about. You can’t rush the process.

But the deadline approaches all the same.