The Story

I am typing for all the writers, wanna-be novelists, and people who just happen to stumble across this page when I say that the story under construction is a baby. If you quit work on it, you have lost a child. While you may not feel quite that way, understand that there are points in the process of writing a book when you will feel disgusted with yourself for writing something; perfectly natural. If you don't feel like an asshole for giving a character a traumatic background, you are an insensitive person. There are also times when you will feel so proud of an idea, you almost cry. An example of the former:

In a story I am writing, the main character is blinded by a madman with a knife. At age seven. At age twelve, his uncle kills his mother. And father. And chases him out of the house with a knife. And puts a bounty on his head. His uncle forced him to live as a thief, when he had spent his entire early life as a prince. And in that city, bad thieves didn't stay thieves longer than they stayed six feet under in unholy ground. Nor did the necromancers let them stay underground more than a week.

The point of that? That you don't have to be kind to your characters. They don't have to live perfect lives, in perfect homes, with a perfect family and perfect friends, all living in a perfect city, in a perfect country, with only a small skirmish going on in the far corner of the planet the thing that disrupts the beauty. You can make your character's lives a living hell, from having friends die to family members, from having a papercut to having a limb slowly sawn off by a blunt dagger. But if you don't feel like a terrible person, an asshole that doesn't deserve to live, a right bastard after doing that, you don't know your characters well enough. Your characters should be your friends, whether they are the kind of people you would befriend or not.

Not only do the characters speak to you, however; the story should as well. If you have difficulty writing a scene, and have tried five times without success, you can do one of two things: 

Change setting--if you are having trouble writing something in a particular setting I find that the setting ends up pushing you into a rut of bad writing. The story doesn't like that setting. Nor does it like jerky acting by the characters.

WAIT--if a change of setting doesn't help, the story isn't ready for that part yet!!! So simple, isn't it? Maybe put another chapter in, or two, or ten, but don't try to force it out. It makes for bad writing.

You see the theme here? Bad writing=bad. Quite simple, hmm?
It will happen to everyone at one time or another; however, if you do not correct it when you are able, you are the one at fault and not the story or your imagination.