Getting stuck on what the story is really about

I've been writing, which is--I know, pretty strange in itself, but I've been writing and thinking, and trying to figure out a workshop I'm doing in December. I know I should be working on the subplot workshop, but I got hooked into figuring out how to make a working writer with productivity issues more productive. Maybe I just have a bad case of healer, heal thyself. No matter what I did--it felt "wrong". It had no umphf. It just laid there, all limp and pitiful. I'd figured out the internal and external drivers. I knew the heroine's core event. I knew what I wanted to happen, but I couldn't get it down on paper until I thought about the inciting incident.

I knew the inciting incident was the heroine's meeting with the hero. It's a romantic suspense, and it's right up front where it should be. It took me ten days, working my way through my own advice to take a giant step back and say, "The story isn't about the murder." The murder is simply how I show the story. The story is  about the heroine accepting she had perception issues and got messed up thinking love was some idealized emotion. And that all the time she'd thought she wasn't loved, she'd been loved very much.

• I'd forgotten the story was character-driven and set up the externals instead of the arc. It might be a romantic suspense, but it's a character-"driven" romantic suspense and the suspense is elements, not the whole shebang.
• I didn't ask myself what the story was really about.
• And more importantly, I didn't start troubleshooting until I'd rewritten the beginning twenty times.

I didn't waste anything, since I just moved the scene to chapter two, but next time I'll start troubleshooting earlier.