Ever experienced this?

I think that's a great thing, actually. By giving yourself time away from your m/s you can see it with new eyes. I did that with mine. Aaannndd, I'll be doing it yet again soon.

Good luck to you--cheers!

My writing tends to look pretty ghastly to me even just after a first draft. I finish it, look at it, and have to ask myself whether I'm really a native English speaker.

Yes, it's happened to me. I sometime look at stuff I wrote a long time ago, and I wonder what in the world I was thinking when I wrote it. Our writing evolves, even if we're not actively writing the whole time, because we as people change. I think it's a fairly common occurrence.

I'm pretty sure my writing skill actually went backwards in the time between the first draft and my just-started second draft. I used to be awesome, but now I have rubbish grammar and my characters talk like badly programmed robots.

The only way I know to get past it is to keep writing anyway. There will be more drafts after this one, so if I can at least put rough concrete in some of the plot holes I can think about more decorative surfaces later on.

No, I don't know how that turned into a floor-covering analogy. Just wait until I start wondering if my story needs tiles or carpet and then speculate on what to do in the 'wet' areas.

When I first started writing a couple of years back, I read somewhere that you were supposed to write your work, let it sit for a week or so, and then look at it again and hopefully see it in a different light. So seeing it as being 'stilted' or another way i.e. bad, vomit-worthy, sickening to the very fiber of your being, etc. is not uncommon. (BTW, the "bad, vomit-worthy, and sickening to the very fiber of your being" comment was how I would describe my writing first drafts and not yours).

It's all a matter of perspective. Time away, new experiences, phrases heard or twisted, maturity, and more can affect your vision and your idea of your former work(s). Taking a bit of time off is, to me, actually a good idea, as it does give you time to figure out where you might have gone wrong with the theme or fix your syntax or characters or whatever. JMO...

srgalactica said:

I am doing a complete rewrite as the novel has changed significantly so I'm taking this on as though I'm writing the first draft all over again.

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I'm wondering to what degree you're using the old version as a reference on an on-going basis. I'd suggest reading it a few times, taking notes etc, then putting it away and writing it from scratch. I think if you do that the sentences will be generated by your new flow, and the more you reference and try to include the old version, the more that will interfere with the new flow.

I also suggest writing by hand.

Is it possible that you're putting too much pressure on yourself? You know you want it to be better than the original, so maybe you're being over critical. Allow yourself to write without worrying so much. Chances are your writing is actually better. You just need to be in the same zone and let the words flow again. If you can write with music, maybe you could try that. It helps me.

I am sort of in that phase now. You just have to write through it, and give yourself plenty of time to adjust. It's hard to pick up something that you haven't been doing for a long time. What really helps me is writing little short stories in between the bigger stories you are working on. (though, these days, all I'm doing is writing short stories. It's a little embarrassing.)