Feeling Downhearted

I knew I'd need to start revising the first half of my novel sometime, as much as I dreaded doing it, so having nothing on my plate yesterday, I dove in.

It's terrible.

I wish I could start my story in the middle, where it started getting interesting, because the beginning is so boring, no one will read past the first page. I was bored just scanning it. 

I have no idea how to proceed. Do I scrap it entirely? It provides the foundation of the story, but it's completely lifeless. As much as I've questioned my reliance on dialogue in the second half, the opening setup has barely any, which turns the characters flat. 

Too, I don't think knowing how the story proceeds is helping at all. I found myself impatient to move on, to get to the "good parts", but instead I had to wade through a snooze fest; its only purpose being to establish the plot. 

There are passages I want to keep, particularly the ones that show how bad things became with the main character's band, which in turn explains why she quit and took off down the road, but people will read them and think, Okay, this is going on far too long. Where's the payoff? At that point in the story, no one is going to care, probably because they will have no connection to the characters. 

The only thing I managed to accomplish was to come up with a better opening line.

Then there's the problem of the characterization itself. Granted, when I began the story waaaay back when, my only idea was to show how jaded the main character had become due to her bad experiences. What I didn't perceive at the time was that one can't establish a character as one thing and then change her into another thing. The way I wrote the story, she's jaded and cynical, then once she settles in her new town, she's suddenly naive and wide-eyed. Maybe instead of cynical, she just needed to be downhearted, like I am currently.

I noticed as well that I fell back into a bad habit I thought I'd conquered long ago ~ my back story goes on and on. That's a surefire way to bore a reader to tears. While it's important to establish the reasons the MC is the way she is, it can definitely be tightened up. I don't need four paragraphs to explain something that can be conveyed in one! Again, these miscues are the result of no planning. I started writing the story with no forethought and worked it out on the page. Stupid.

It's clear I'm going to need to start over. The trouble is, I don't know how to do it. This is why I hate rewriting. Revising is one thing; this will require trashing the opening completely. It's also going to require forgetting everything I've previously written and starting with a blank page.

I'll probably feel sorry for myself for a while, then try again. Surely, I'm not completely incompetent, am I? 

If the second half of the story wasn't so good, I'd likely chuck the whole thing. But it would be a shame to throw it all away. Who knows if I'll ever write another?