I've been working on the same novel for six years--not unusual in any way, so that's not the issue. The issue is the long process of me thinking I'm doing great and then getting smacked back down by the writing gods because I'm doing major things badly either because I just didn't know what I needed to do or I was trying to shortcut.
The first time, it was that I didn't even know what structure was let alone that I needed it, so it took me two years of crits on my fourth and fifth drafts of the novel (all drafts written from scratch) for someone to tell me "Your story lacks structure." Queue research and study for the next six months--reading romance novels and advice books. Then I wrote draft six, my current one. Edited it, got it critted, beta read, and then I got sucked into watching the train wreck of YouTuber the iilluminaughtii's downfall and realized how well pieces of her behavior fit my antagonist but I hadn't fleshed them out. So I looked into it further, and that led me into a deep dive into train wrecks of all kinds in the YouTube community--not necessarily downfalls, sometimes just the people existing on the platform. Then I looked into other aspects of my novel, all of this mostly through other people's analysis of all these people's behavior (therapists and such) so I could understand it.
And I realized one major thing--while I'd gotten a lot of compliments on the book and people told me it was just about ready, I'd only dived in just below the skin on all my characters, the antagonist, and the setting. There is a chasm there waiting to be tapped, and I wasted almost an additional two years because I didn't do enough research. Now I need to research some very serious topics as well as some very unpleasant ones, and it's going to suck. Abuse (everything from DV to religious abuse), cults and the psychology behind them, and various aspects of restrictive and tightly controlled religious environments. (I'm not equating the latter two, but I'm combining them in my novel for a fictional situation.)
But my book is going to be so much better for doing all this.
The only thing is that I think it might require yet another draft, probably pushing me back from publishing another two years between researching, writing, critting, and beta reading.
AND THEN-- I already have book two written and I realized that I screwed up with research on that one too! So as soon as the first book goes into the critting process, I'm diving back into research with book two.
I'm so overwhelmed and frustrated. I absolutely love the process of trading critiques, and over the last five and a half years since I started using websites like this, I've always had work to share. For the first time, I don't.
I need a cookie.