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I start writing a short story, I'm loving it. If I didn't love it, if I didn't want to tell it, I wouldn't be writing it.

I finish the first draft, I still love it, and am so proud of completing it. But by the time I'm in my third or fourth draft, I begin to feel that the core idea of the story is unoriginal and beaten to death, that I'm not saying anything new, and additionally that I'm not even telling it very well.

Now to some extent, any artist experiences self-doubt, and if I've been working at an idea for a while, it's reasonable that it would appear stale and worked to death *to me* - because of the very fact that I've been working on it for a while. But on the other hand, I might be right. It might be that over the course of writing and editing I came to know more than I did when I started the project, and the idea is indeed not as fresh as I initially thought.

How do I distinguish the two - how do I know if the self-criticism is correct, or if it's just usual self-doubt that should be ignored?

(I suppose beta readers are going to come up. But is anyone really going to tell me "listen dear, this thing is stale"?)