One piece of advice I’ve seen is to write constantly. Another piece of advice I’ve seen is to just get it all out on the page and not worry about how it turns out, to fix it in the editing stage.
Except, I can’t help but go back and overthink it. If I write a section or piece, I’m constantly revising as I go along, reworking a sentence or scene or even the word choice as I write. Most recently, I had put myself to a challenge to write 500 words a day (I’ve already failed). I wrote a scene for a story I’d like to work on, but then next day I looked it over and didn’t like it. So I deleted it, and then thought some about what to do instead, and then didn’t write anything more than that.
I think this is a normal part of writing, at least it is for me. I write, delete, and rewrite not only sentences, scenes, and chapters, but entire stories. Or, I don’t. I have many more stories I’ve started and abandoned, than completed. But, I still enjoyed writing them.
The important thing is you enjoy the process, that it’s not stressful for you, it’s supposed to be fun. Unless it’s your paying job, you don’t need to complete what you start, and it doesn’t need to be perfect, or even good--this is allowed. I think if you give yourself permission to be imperfect, or even to give up, then you’ll find that you can move forward in a story and complete it. Keep telling yourself, when you’re tempted to go back again and again, that it doesn’t need to be perfect, it can be just good enough this time. Set the goal of completion, not perfection. Maybe instead of setting a number of words per day, set a deadline for completion, something reasonable, that will spur you to keep going.
The last book I wrote sat for over a year without an ending, because I had written toward a particular ending, and when I got there, I didn’t like the ending anymore. I couldn’t come up with a new ending that wouldn’t require rewriting most of the book, so I just let it sit.
I’d be out for a walk and come up with something I thought might work, so I’d go home and take a stab at it. By “take a stab at it”, I mean that I’d need to skim-read the whole book to make sure the idea would work, because I’d forgotten the details of the plot. Usually, the new idea would not work, so I’d leave it alone for weeks or months more. I did that a few times before I finally figured it out. Too well, as it turned out. I came up with two endings I loved, that both also worked. So, I said, “fuck it”, and wrote them both. Now, the book has two endings, and I don’t care. I like it, and that’s all that matters to me. It’s too long, it’s repetitive, and it has two endings, but I refuse to change it. Last time I looked no one had commented that they’d read it all the way through, and that’s fine.