But that other idea is so shiny

"As it turns out, I have had this same crisis with every novel I have written ... . I am sure my idea is horrible, and that a new idea is my only hope. But what I've realized over the years is that every new idea eventually becomes the old idea." --Ann Patchett, "The Getaway Car," This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Patchett has a lot more to say about this, but I don't want to copy her whole article. I relate to her point about novels taking so long to write that it's especially hard (harder, say, than when writing a poem or short story) to keep one's enthusiasm high for the duration of the whole project. Short stories were always satisfying that way: I could draft from beginning to end in one sitting; I could keep the whole thing in my head as I revised; if a story failed I could just go on to the dozens of other stories I had in various stages of completion.

But a novel takes more commitment, more tolerance of the slow times, more trust that all the little ripples you set in motion will reach the various shores you've aimed at. It takes so much longer to build in the layers that a novel needs (a short story can be layered, but it can also be punchy or piercing, and even if it has a hundred layers none of them need to be a hundred acres across, the way the layers of a novel must be). A novel takes more patience. And when a novel fails, it can mean months or years of work without a visible product.

As happy as I am with the books I've written, every single one of them gave me days (or weeks) when I was ready to give up on them, when I'd had enough or didn't see how to fix them or wondered who else would care about them besides me. They also gave me days of pure joy, days when I was so wrapped up in the story that I never wanted to leave that fictional world.

Mostly, it was a matter of waiting out the darker days. Trusting that another day's work might bring me to the corner I needed to turn.