Getting Pissed

I have a story due for workshopping purposes on Friday--and it's been going nowhere. Seriously, I don't know why this tale has been giving me such grief. It's not enough that I've been having trouble writing anything new, but now I can't even revise my older material. Though, maybe, it's just this story, and I need to let it burn. I think, with this one, I might be trying to hang on to everything I love about the story and just need to kill my darlings. But this is where I'm having the conflict, because if I kill all of my darlings, the story will lose all of its interesting bits, its flair, its pizazz. Or whatever.

As good of advice as it seems to be, I can't help but question this idea for making fiction better. Am I not simply taking my gushing gibberish of great moments, then distilling them into functional form of boringness? Hopefully not. But the more I learn about fiction and structure and what a good story needs, etc., the more I worry about whether or not my stories fill every desire. It makes me want to break out of traditional story methods and do my own thing, screw the rest of the literary world (which is probably a good thing), but I know there must be a balance between new and traditional. Balancing has never been my thing.

All I can do is press on, find a new way for my stories to exist and function. But, man, that sounds like so much work...