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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/19821
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Don't throw it away, re-read it. If you don't like it that much when you re-read it, stow it away for a couple of years. During this time you might try taking the concept and re-writing it with a different viewpoint character and a fresh setting. That will give you another manuscript to work with down the road. It may end up being the novel you want it to be. Or it may not. Or it may need to be stowed away for a number of years before re-reading. Write a couple of novels between your current reading of the first novel you wrote, and the next reading. So: say it's now 2017 and you've written another 120,000 words between when you read your first novel and stowed it away. NOW re-read it. You'll be a different person and able to see it with new eyes. I recently re-read a novel I wrote in 2007. I'd re-read it a couple of times in the intervening years and I always thought there was something there but I couldn't quite see what was crap and what was worth keeping.And a lot of it felt too confessional. I read it again with a friend a few months ago (it's 2015 now), and we workshopped it, and now I'm very clear that there's a LOT in it worth keeping, and I have an idea for an entirely different story I'm writing around it (expanding it from 50,000 to 90,000-100,000 words or so). The context I'm adding makes the previous writing even more interesting than it was before. So keep in mind: lots of writing improves over time, and even if it seems awful to you when you read it at 5 years, another 5 could make all the difference in terms of making it clear whether it's usable or not. And in the meantime: write. Write, write, write, write, write.

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