Yes, I'm crazy

Hi S -

I kind of sort of understand what you are saying. (btw - thanks for sharing that level of detail about your situation.)

In terms of getting things done - here's something that might help.

I had a lot of trouble starting, continuing and finishing pretty much anything. A part of my mind sabotages most things I do. What has allowed me to get things done was to deceive it, bargain with it, and to fly under its radar. For example - could you write one sentence of the tainted thing - but tell the part of you that is judging that you are really doing something else? Just one sentence. For example, the first thing I finished - it took me a whole year and it was about 6000 words long. I promised myself that every day on my lunch break I would write something of my story. Sometimes - often, in fact - I only wrote one sentence. But I gave myself a pat on the back for it because - I wrote. I got to the end with many sections full of notes, in parentheses, about what I wanted to do on the revision - particular because I couldn't think of content for some scenes. (I also spent a lot of time writing first person scenes with some of the major characters to help me figure out how to use them) This was also all in notebooks.

At the end of the year I had worked through a whole story from beginning through middle to end - but it was not in a form that anybody could read. So I wanted to write a revision that someone could read. But for days and days and days - weeks, actually, I would sit down - and some kind of compulsion prevented me from forming the sentence that would make up the sentences of the text.

I thought about this for a long time - I asked questions and read books. What I came up with - and this worked - was to redefine the work. Instead of saying 'I want to re-write my story so that someone else can read it' I said 'I want to rewrite my story so that each sentence is grammatically correct, in the appropriate narrative voice, and follows logically from the sentence that preceded it.'

You know, Satyesu - it was kind of unreal that simply saying something different to myself could have such an effect. Suddenly I began writing and finished my rewrite in a matter of weeks (as opposed to the months the first version took). All because of what I said to myself about what I was doing.

Hey. I don't know how to solve it, but I have that same thing.

At least I've disallowed myself from tainting my current WIP by accidentally thinking about it during a "snag". It's got special protected status, and also any idea I have related to it is safe; I could have thought of it later at an untainted time. Us OCD people are good at making rules and following them, so try to make rules that help you get better instead of more crazy.

Also draw a line in the sand that says your crazy doesn't get to cause major impacts on your life. Hey, if you were driving a car, and got in a snag, would you not hit the brakes and roll through a red light because the snag wasn't finished? No. Not writing a bestseller is as big an impact on your life. Basically, commit to be at least functionally mentally ill. You might never feel 100% okay about your bestseller because of this issue, but my guess is you won't regret it.

On some level, I think everyone experiences "snags," but at some point in my own writing I realized that it's not supposed to be that hard.
What happens, by the way, if you slowly think your way through the snag? Is that an option for you guys? I've always just brute forced my way through. For example, some authors "roll a sentence" over and over in their heads. I do something similar until the snag slowly falls away. Or am I misunderstanding by what you mean by "snag"?