See what I mean? It's endless and often times pointless. Gasp!
I think the obsessing stems from a breakdown of what's on the page and what's in your head. In your mind you have this epic sprawling tale of love and woe but the epicness is just, for whatever reason, not coming across when written down.
For me, it was kind of mind-blowing when I realized that the reason this was happening was because my ability level was not quite high enough. There's a quote by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki that I really like: "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus 10,000 repetitions is skill."
Sure we all know how to write. But it takes practice to know how to convey the story in your head to the written word. You literally have to just keep writing action scenes in order to figure out how to write an action scene that meets your expectations. And in the process you're probably going to write a lot of really cruddy scenes. And then maybe one spectacular one that you try to recreate only to realize that you basically just wrote the same thing twice.
Rewriting the same scene over and over again will accomplish nothing. Write the scene as best you can, make sure it's grammatically well put together and then move on. In other words, create the best story you can at this moment in time. It is unreasonable to demand more than that. You must allow yourself time and repetitions for your craft to naturally grow. In order for growth to happen you have to approach the challenges from different angles.
