When you read a good writer, it feels like they have everything lined up in their head, all the themes and plotlines and character arcs, and they're just spooling it out for you in a controlled way to keep you hooked. For me that's the part I can't seem to do, keeping everything in my head so I can spool it out in an organized way. I can come up with characters and themes and ideas, and I have a mature perspective on the world, and I can feel things, but the mechanics of actually fucking writing just seem to elude me.
Can practice fix this? Anyone with adhd experience this and get past it?
Medication. Just got on concerta. 100% life changing. I can just think without any difficulty, without distraction, without task initiation problems or losing track of what I'm doing or a million other miseryies.
I gotta stop rationing my short-acting adderall and get a new prescription
Honestly the only big secret in writing is you kind of have to kill your inner perfectionist. "Good" writers don't submit their first draft to printers and have it be bought. There's lots of drafts and edits.
If you can get yourself to start writing or have a habit of putting anything to page at least once a day, you'll go pretty far! I know those can be a struggle for people with ADHD, but I can't think of anything else than literally get something on the page (which is why Nanowrimo is such a big deal, just getting 100K words as a goal can be helpful). You can fix stuff later, don't get too caught up on making sure literally everything is lined up on the first draft.
For the record, I've written a few plays, I've done nanowrimo, but mostly I've written academic papers - but I know the struggle of staring at a blank page regardless and honestly just killing your inner perfectionist and just letting stuff flow is such a good way for me to get over writers block.
I can get words out if pressed (although that too is a struggle), but the stuff that comes out just seems too disorganized. I don't want to ramble. I want the writing to be dense with all the threads and ideas in my head, so it feels like I'm going somewhere with it and every word helps build up to something. That's the kind of writing I really like to read. It makes for good prose too.
but writing faster like you suggest might help fix that too. It's easier to hold stuff in your mind for a shorter period of time lol.
speech-to-text your rambling then instead of writing time have editing time? those workflows might be different enough that your brain will take to one then the other
and you can always break out the string and pushpins if you have to.
I've actually never tried that. I guess I'm embarrassed to say stuff out loud. It seems worth a shot though.
Let go of the idea that you will write things in order. Let go of the notion that you will create anything without multiple drafts. Writing is one of the messiest fucking creative processes out there, and every writer does it in a different way. The few stories I've actually finished bore little resemblance to the first draft once I was finally done with them. Just write. Produce content. In the past year I've been inconsistent but I've filled more than one notebook almost completely with my story ideas, characters, outlines, bits of writing, sketches, lists of places and technologies, etc. and started to form a coherent narrative out of the ideas I've had floating around in my head.
Coming back to your ideas about writing: when you read a published book, you're looking at the end result of years of brainstorming, prewriting, drafts, rewrites, edits, notes, large sections being cut out or moved around, etc. It's a process. It takes a while. It's frustrating. It's painful. It requires lots of doing the same shit over and over again. As far as I can tell, thinking you're a talentless hack who will never succeed in anything or even finish this damn project is normal, it's a part of the process. Just like failure. Failure is necessary. I'll repeat that: Failure is necessary. Part of learning what parts of your stories work is learning what parts don't work. Sometimes you have to throw shit away. Sometimes you go digging through your own trash, though, and find an idea or a bit of dialogue or prose that you can reuse somewhere else, or jam together with another thing that didn't work to make them both work.
In short, just start writing shit down without rhyme or reason. Something will form, layer by layer. From there it's just the usual motivational shit and organizational shit that every other writer has to deal with, just with that extra layer of neurospiciness on top. Take your meds, do your stims, get your dopamine flowing, and believe in yourself. Be your own biggest fan.
