Editing is definitely the hardest thing for an author to do. You've spent hours, days, months writing, so why would you want to get rid of anything? This is definitely something I struggled with at the start, and still do to some extent.
In this post, I'll give you some reasons why redrafting is so important, and why it isn't a 'failure', but room to improve.
1. Just because it doesn't belong in this work doesn't mean it's no good. I always have, and always will, encourage you to keep any passages you get rid of. It might be a sentence, an analogy, or a whole passage that you love, but it just doesn't work in this story. Make yourself a folder to keep these in, and use them as inspiration for a new story.
2. Redrafting, whether you're doing it for yourself or for a publisher, is done for a reason. Your audience is your top priority - you want people to like your story and read on. Therefore, redrafting is done mainly to this end. You could edit forever, making things flow better, changing words or phrases, but a big redraft should help the integrity of the story and the plot.
3. Redrafting is actually really satisfying. To know you're improving your work is a gratifying experience! It can be really nice once you've finished redrafting to compare your first iteration of your story to your last. This will also help you with your editing in the future as you tend to need to improve on some of the same points from one story to the next.
Remember: you're doing great! Writing is hard and it's easy to take this out on yourself, but you should never be ashamed of anything you've written, just be proud of how far you've come.
Happy writing!
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