So here's my issue: I've been writing and reading nearly constantly since I discovered my love for literature. That was last year. Since then my writing got steadily better, dispite my lack of a literary support group (besides YWS). Unfortunately, in the recent month I feel as if it has dropped in skill. I'm starting to feel rather discouraged, so any advice or encouragement that anyone could give would be great.
I think we all feel like that at some point, and you'll go through it multiple times. I know there are definite times where I felt like not only was I not improving, but that I was actually getting worse. In some cases, that was actually true. But most of the time, it was just my imagination.
Writing depression, though not a depression in the normal sense of the meaning, is indeed quite crippling, and the best advice I can offer is to simply take a break. What's going on is that you become too self-conscious of your writing, when in reality you need to recognize that first, second, third drafts are supposed to be very rough. You shouldn't actually get a polished story until several drafts later, and, as was the case with Kafka, you may never feel like your story is ever polished.
So take a break. Spend time reading, critiquing other pieces, then come back to it. If you don't get the kind of comments you're hoping for, then what of it? Take the constructive critiques, apply the fixes, then revisit again, and again, and again. There are really only two short stories out of dozens that I've written that I'm actually proud of, and that's because I constantly revise them.
By the by, which two are the stories you are proud of? When an author is proud of his/her work it makes it all the better to read, because you can feel the author's heart between the lines.
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