When good enough is not good enough

Young Woman Drawing (Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes) by Marie Denise Villers, 1801

Until yesterday, I was super happy with my current story-in-progress. The drafting went comparatively fast, and the second draft revision was smooth. The sentence-by-sentence writing developed a few lovely turns, and I was happy with everything I’d done until the third draft polish when suddenly—

I realized the last quarter of the story was dumb. Beautifully written, but dumb. I mean, it was okay. It...