Why finish it, if it is not going to be good anyway?

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I finally decided to read the short story that I started during my trip back from Konstanz. 

It sucks.

I was surprised. Not that I expected a masterpiece, but definitely something much better. However, I heard that professional writers with long careers always feel that what they wrote is not good. So it seems to be a widespread phenomenon, independently of the quality of the story.

On the other hand, I also heard of this 1/3 "depression" when writing a novel, i.e., after having written around 1/3 of a novel, authors think that the novel sucks and want to throw it away. The only advice to overcome this seems to be: just accept it, and power through it.

I wonder if this is what is happening here: I want to throw away the story, but I am going to try instead to finish it by putting it into shape (I will try to rewrite as little as possible). But it is hard to put myself to work on it because it feels like it is going to be a lot of work and I may not end up satisfied.

But I guess that the challenge now is not going to be the art of fiction writing, but the art of psychological self-management.




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