Nothing can be more upsetting to a work-in-progress than a really really good day’s writing.
Those hours you seem a stranger to yourself, because the sentences are coming so easily, and fit so exactly with how the overall project must be.
Why isn’t it always like this? you think.
But novels are written the next day, and the next day, rather than simply the day you’re in.
And what you write or change on this page here is mostly to help you when you come to write that page there.
This means that something unbalanced, a paragraph that comes out absolutely gorgeously, might be an important breakthrough but could also become an immediate obstruction.
Not that it doesn’t fit with the prose elsewhere, though that’s a possibility; more that it doesn’t fit with you and your mumbling-stumbling self.
A really really good day is like a compliment from someone whose opinion you don’t quite trust.
Doubt is the almost inevitable follow up.
If they admire me, and they admire me in that way, how can I do anything but be ashamed of myself?
Experienced novelists usually aim for a regular life that helps them do regular work in if not a regular then a recognisable mode.
Some worship the exact wordcount; almost all venerate the bare keeping going.
A series of bad days is demoralising, and it can make you doubt yourself, but it doesn’t make you embarrassed in front of yourself.
Shame makes one unwilling to risk further embarrassment. It makes the comforting playlist sound better, and brings the duvet warmly down over the head.
I’ll just hide a little while longer. No-one will miss me.
In some ways, I think it’s lack of embarrassment — willingness to be a bit fruity, in their own particular way — that makes distinctive writers what they are.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid really really good days, or hope they don’t now and again come along, but if you find the next one is followed by a hangover, and guilt, and a strong wish to hibernate, I hope reading this will help.