Hello ladyfickle. I know what you are talking about! The thing that gives me hope for myself as a writer is that I love revision—I love it more than drafting new material. Writing new stuff is painful for me; excruciatingly slow, with product that is almost always excruciatingly awful. But it gives me material to work with on revision. So I revise, and revise, and revise and revise and revise.
For short stories, that means often going through the story as a whole eight times or more; certain parts even more than that. My experience with short stories is that they get worse before they get better, or rather, I feel worse about them before I start to see the polish emerge. I get more and more frustrated as the story fails to do what I want it to do, as write new bits that don’t fix the problem or that make it worse; as I rearrange things and have to throw away parts I liked to make the new structure work. Eventually, though, I pull some lever and suddenly the thing falls into place, and I’m no longer writing new material or rearranging—only making sentence-level edits. And that is incredibly satisfying.
With novels, well, I am still at work on my first one, and it’s been four years. Some parts of it I’m relatively pleased with and have shown to critique partners; others are not fit for human consumption and ought to be killed with fire and then buried in a swamp. I’m in the midst of a major push through the whole manuscript right now—and I’m in something like the state you’re describing. The parts that are not bad get a little better, while the parts that are terrible get scrapped and rewritten from the ground up. And what does that leave me with? Some parts are pretty polished; others, for all of that work, are still in that poor first-draft state. It’s maddening!
I think, though, that the quality of the whole is better for all this work. I know that I will have to do this entire process again, and probably again after that to get the novel anywhere close to where I want it to be, not to mention all the sentence-level stuff that will have to come once the bones of the thing are in place. It is, if you’ll pardon the inelegant word choice, a shit-ton of work. A lot of it is painful, and a lot of it is on material that may never be seen by another human. But I tell myself that it is all making me a better writer, and making the final product better, even the stuff that comes out terrible and gets scrapped before it even gets typed into the manuscript.
TL;DR, the best thing about revision is that when it works, it’s so deeply satisfying—to see this grotesque lump of clay with little bits of rock and hair stuck in it slowly take shape under my tenacious effort, to begin to look like the thing I had in my head when I started, to start to take on a little sheen of polish, to finally become something I’m willing to show to someone else and say “look what I made.” Truthfully—the pleasure of that experience is what keeps me writing.