figuring it out

I don't know if it's the cooler, drizzly weather or what, but the tone of my pov character has changed over the past week. The story has gotten darker too, so chicken/egg/weather. Anyway, it's more introspective than I'd originally planned for her, and if it works, I'll need to watch the tone during the next draft and bring it all to the same level. Is this character growth or Christine-growth? I'm still relatively new to writing and I wonder if feeling like I'm trying to reinvent the wheel is a common feeling. Forgive the cliche, but I feel like I'm going through steps that other people have walked - this path teaches plot; this path is conflict; this path shows you how to create a character - and I don't know why I assumed that this stuff would be innate rather than a really long learning process.
Though the more I think about it, the more I think this is probably a very common feeling. Every composer has played a piece that was written before, following the notes on the paper, trying to figure out the fingering, trying to make the same sounds that were made before as they also try to figure out how making music works. (mental image of ghost hands playing a song on the piano as intended as the newbie stumbles over her fingernails)
I've been reading a lot of writer blogs lately, and a lot of writers didn't publish until their fourth or fifth go around at this. At first, I was thinking, oh, crap. That's a really long time. Two years a book: 8-10 years. Now I'm thinking - hey, no wonder. I'm halfway through the second one and I'm just now starting to look at characters in books as characters and trying to figure out how they work (or don't) rather than just what's going to happen next.
I have a long way to go.

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