Writerly Growing Pains

I am seriously HATING the story I'm working on.  It's taking forever.  It's making me angry.  It's messing with the general day-to-day of my life.  Seriously, seriously irksome.  I keep pushing at it, though, plugging away at the keys to get more of it out because I believe in it.  At least, I believe in it way down deep beneath the part of my brain that screams how much this sucks.  How much *I* suck.  Except I obviously don't really feel that way, because I keep going.

The problem is that I believe in myself and in my story concept.  I believe in what I'm trying to do.  So much, in fact, that I'm taking the biggest personal risk I possibly can as a writer.  And yet, I feel like I suck, like the story is the most awful thing I've ever written.

This morning, Janice Hardy, author of the middle grade novel, "The Shifter," (a novel I'm really wanting to read, and have been since it first came out several years ago,) posted on this exact problem.  She calls it a Growing Pains Novel.  A story that stretches the writer far enough that every word that flows onto the page is just HARD.

And that's what's wrong with this story.  It needs to be as good as I believe it can be.  As good as I know I am.  So I'm trying new things.  They don't always make it onto the page, but they're in there, and my subconscious is always aware of them.  Creating in-line, dynamic descriptions, for one.  Writing from the perspective of a curmudgeon who has a lot of the answers and therefore doesn't need to think about them (and in that way, share them with the audience), for another.  I'm a thinky, introspective person.  My POV characters have almost always been thinky sorts of people (and if they weren't, I didn't spend a whole book in their heads).  This character is definitely thinky, but it's in a totally different way.  He thinks more like I do - he skips steps because he has them down by rote.  If a recipe calls for "two eggs," most of us don't have to think about how to crack them open, be careful of the shells, check for problems (or fetal chicks, if you buy organic).  We just do it automatically.  To this character, a lot of his answers arrive in the same way.  Which leaves me with a lot of descriptive, character-revealing imagery, but not a lot of logical steps.  How does he know that random fact A and random fact B are connected?  Because they always are.  Because stepping from A to B (or more accurately, A to F) is automatic.  It makes bringing the reader along with him very tricky.

Oh, and did I mention it's short, and I don't do short?  Yeah.  So it's definitely a Growing Pains Story.  But that's good, too, because I know it will be as good as I can currently make it when it's All Done.