As I sit here, I have fewer than six weeks before the ‘firm delivery date for a full manuscript in good order.’ Nearly every word in that phrase - drawn verbatim from my editor’s email - fills me with anxiety. I vacillate wildly between arrogant confidence and sickening certainty that I will fail.
I use Scrivener for my longer writing projects, and it features a page displaying all sections of the manuscript, with word counts against each one. 75K is the word limit for my submission and 70K is the ideal, so this table should make me feel optimistic. Sometimes it does, for a moment.
For no reason at all, at the end of each day I copy any changes in the numbers onto a physical whiteboard and also enter them onto an Excel spreadsheet. Perhaps in one of these repetitions I’ll find a layer that persuades me that the words are really there.
Then again, I know the secrets of this table: that even in chapters that are full and look ‘done,’ the footnotes and endnotes are incomplete; that there are still things I want to add or take out; that it could always be better, so much better. That some of the ‘in progress’ chapters that look well on their way are full of incoherent ramblings.
I try to remind myself that a few short months ago, there was hardly anything in this table at all, that I almost threw in the towel. Many people in my writing community and elsewhere have given me fabulous feedback on the topic and the chapters I’ve read to them.
How much comforting do I need? I’ve never obtained the requisite amount, at least not for long. Is there any anxiety-management strategy so simultaneously addictive and ineffective as reassurance seeking?
Writing this walks the fine line between an avoidance activity and something useful. Useful because this is the first time this morning that my fingers, stiff from a fortnight of relative disuse, are moving on the keyboard. Useful because I am delivering on a promise to publish a Substack every Wednesday until the end of the year, and isn’t it fundamentally important, this discipline, in writing? It’s in those moments when you’re convinced no words are left in your brain that you need to ‘show up,’ isn’t it? Useful because perhaps you will read this, yes you, and give me what I crave, and despite reassurance’s short shelf life, some little burst of it may lend me the courage I need at a critical moment.
But it’s avoidance too. More worthwhile and certainly more task-adjacent than a Netflix binge, but it’s still easier than stepping into that cringing and painful imposter-syndrome place that I always wander into when I’ve downed tools on the book for for too long and go back into it. There are so many things right now that are easier to do than engaging with the damn manuscript. I shouldn’t call it the damn manuscript, I suppose. I shouldn’t make an enemy of it. We’re supposed to be working together, it and I.
I had a routine over the summer that was working, so well that I was loath to change anything. Real life forced me back to the UK and disrupted my idyllic schedule, but for most of the summer I was in a perfect and privileged situation. I was cosseted, really. I slept and worked in a little house on my parents’ property. Every day I would wake between 6 and 7 am, and eschewing the society of others, I would not go out the door of the little house but would drink my coffee and do only two things in the run-up to 8 am: the New York Times crossword and my Duolingo Latin.
Duolingo is the world’s most popular language-learning app. Not all languages are featured - it was no help at all on my recent trip to Croatia, which is unfortunate because my brain folded up like an umbrella when confronted with the phonetics at the back of the Lonely Planet guidebook - so you might be surprised that one can use Duolingo to study a dead language, and equally bemused that anyone would embark upon such a course, much less finish it.
Yet I am that person.
Before you think that this is the scholarly equivalent of alphabetising your spices and organising your closet when you’re on a firm deadline for a full manuscript in good order - and I’m not ruling that strand of motivation out - I also tell myself that other drivers were at play here.
Not for nothing is Duolingo top trumps in the language-app contest. Bubones sunt sapientes (owls are wise), and this bird knows every positive- reinforcement trick in the book. If I did well, Duo danced, rejoiced, and puffed up with pride, accompanied by happy pings designed to hit some auditory bliss point, the distilled sound of accomplishment. If I were late starting my Latin practice, Duo popped up on both my smartwatch and my phone looking worried and sad.
Maybe some have it within them to disappoint a cute cartoon owl, but I’m not a monster.
Suddenly things that had never mattered to me before were mission critical, like maintaining my consistency enough to reach a 100-day streak and reach Wildfire Level 7, or attaining the status of Level-10 Sage. I’m reminded of the late Spalding Gray’s tremendous one-hander Swimming to Cambodia, in which he said that the genius of British directors is the technique they deploy to get actors to do their bidding, which is calling them artists. ‘"Will the artists please get on the helicopters." "Will the artists please jump off the cliff." "Will the artists please..." I mean,’ Spalding said, ‘they will get you to do ANYTHING that way.’
Writing a popular nonfiction book and riddled with imposter syndrome, I desperately needed someone or something to call me a Sage.
If I were allowing myself more than a few moments to write this post, I’d do some proper digging or at least a YouTube search and give you links to references about creative flow states and waking up your verbal brain, but there’s no time. I know that ritual is important, and perhaps it was no more than that, just a bit of pattern recognition. Not only was it a verbiage-focused ritual, but it was a low-stakes one, which feels salient. I’ll never meet an ancient Roman, although if I do, I’ll be reasonably well prepared. But, unlike my editor’s demands for my manuscript, absolutely no one was expecting me to smash my Latin Duolingo course by any particular date. No one cared. At least one person was actively trying to stop me. My daughter, forced by her school into declension hell, couldn’t have been more disgusted that I was nerdily throwing myself into Latin out of my own volition.
When so many obligations and expectations weigh so heavily, when one’s outputs are analysed and judged and productivity is constantly measured, it feels like the purest of indulgence to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake, for the sheer delight of it. Learning something that is - if not entirely irrelevant - well beyond the bounds of the necessary drips with luxury, at least in my world. I tried to explain it to my 12-year-old child: for me, learning Latin on Duolingo is like a five-star holiday, like the most fun video game ever.
Perhaps predictably, she didn’t understand.
The time travel aspect, though, was perhaps the most escapist, compelling aspect of my summer of dead language. Struggling with the reality of my present situation, the onerousness of my task, the gradient of the slope ahead, I discovered in the Latin words and sentences a portal to another place and time, a world I could see and smell and taste. When I was there, I wasn’t here, and that was often a good thing.
The olives are fat (olivae pingues sunt) but there are no peacocks in the market (hoc forum pavonem non habet) and the comrade has thrown the fish upon the floor (comes pisces in pavimentum iacit). I have slain the wretched merchant (Mercatorum miserum interficio) and wild animals have made short work of the building (Animalia aedificium rapide delent), but things aren’t all bad: Corinna is sitting contentedly in bed with her weasel (Corinna et mustela in lecto sedent), and before the first hour the parrot is drunk (ante primam horam psittacus ebrius est). As night falls over the columned temples, the owl - an ancient predecessor of Duo himself - spreads his wings and sails noiselessly into the forum (bubo vesperi ad forum it).
I don’t know whether learning Latin constituted avoidance of my writing or whether it was the secret sauce that enabled me to lay down thousands of good words in a relatively short space of time. I honestly don’t know which function it fulfilled. But when my Latin course was finished, I felt slightly bereft. I resorted to revising my German. Being a modern language, it just doesn’t feel the same.
In any case, for the next five and a half weeks, there’s only one Latin sentence I need to know. Femina sollicita librum scribit.
The worried woman writes a book.