wrex-writes:

It’s not stupid at all.

First of all, try not to draft and edit at the same time. These are two very different mental tasks and they both become harder if you try to do them simultaneously. 

When you’re writing your first draft, try to get back into that zone of writing as you think, of surprising yourself. If you can’t turn off the critical/analytic part of your mind, I’ve found that low-level distractions help. So, music, white noise, anything that takes up just enough attention that you can’t fixate on every detail. (Some folks have differences in the way their attention and verbal processing works that make this impossible, though. I’ll let you know when I’ve done more research on that.)

Second of all, when you revise, do not try to fix everything at once, and don’t crawl through your draft one sentence at a time. Instead, do multiple passes through the whole draft, focusing on a different issue in each pass. 

To begin, read the draft all the way through and take note of large issues you’d like to change – plot points, decisions the characters make, etc. Then rough those changes in, much the way you wrote the draft. Go all the way through your draft when you do this. Later, you can do a pass in which you focus on smaller issues. 

On each pass, you want to get from the beginning to the end fairly quickly, or at least work at a steady pace without lingering over one bit for very long. If you can’t get a passage quite right, make a note and come back to it.

This method helps keep you from getting stuck and rewriting over and over until the end of time. It also helps you see the whole story and treat it a unified experience, not just as a series of parts.

For right now, though, just try to notice when you’re fixating on a single passage. Start by just becoming aware of when that’s happening. That’s the first step in teaching yourself not to linger and get stuck.