I’ve been here. I know this is Proust’s protagonist speaking, and not the author himself, but it’s hard to imagine that Proust never experienced what I suspect is a universal pattern: No need to write tonight because I’m going to write all day tomorrow. Well, that didn’t go well. I probably need some time to relax and de-stress before the real writing can begin. My favorite bit is when he blames his grandmother, who so upsets him by asking about his writing that he definitely needs some time to recover.
I have a vague memory of having seen an excerpt from Chekhov’s journal in which he complains, “Five days and still unable to write. ” But since I cannot find the reference again, perhaps I dreamed it.
While I feel comfortably past this point currently, you never know what could happen tomorrow.
From Within a Budding Grove, C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation.
Had I been less firmly resolved upon setting myself definitely to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was, explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of that long morrow in which everything was so well arranged because I myself had not yet entered it, my good intentions would be realised without difficulty, it was better not to select an evening on which I was ill-disposed for a beginning for which the following days were not, alas, to shew themselves any more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after next I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient for a few hours and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the morrow was not that vast, external day to which I in my fever had looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realised at once, no longer the courage, therefore, to subordinate everything else to their realisation: I began again to keep late hours, having no longer, to oblige me to go to bed early on any evening, the certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my creative energy, several days of relaxation, and the only time that my grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned tone, to frame the reproach: “Well, and that work of yours; aren’t we even to speak of it now?” I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see that my mind was irrevocably made up, she had further and perhaps for a long time postponed the execution of my task, by the shock which her denial of justice to me had given my nerves, since until I had recovered from that shock I should not feel inclined to begin my work.