Operating while distracted: What it's like writing with ADHD
A reflection
Across the world, October commemorates (amongst many other things) ADHD Awareness Month. Everyone with ADHD has their own unique experiences and challenges with navigating life; as a member of this community, I want to take the opportunity to share how being ADHD has affected mine, particularly with regard to my relationship with writing.
The challenges I deal with are not by any means exclusive to people with ADHD, but they can often be more pronounced or persistent. Sometimes the common strategies are less effective, as well, so I have to approach my methods from a different angle. Some of what I discuss may resonate with you, no matter what sort of brain you’ve got; if so, let’s talk about it in the comments!
Here are some of the ways that my creative processes reflect my lived ADHD experiences, and a few strategies that I use to make things easier for myself.
Inspiration and motivation
I have so many ideas.
Constantly, fleetingly, ideas. I’m an absolute whiz at coming up with concepts and premises and characters, because my brain is hardwired to do so. For one thing, it never wants to shut up (great for creativity, horrible for sleep), so there’s always something or other mulling about in the back of my head. I am also, like the rest of the ADHD community, very heavily driven by novelty, which means that I’m always reaching for something newer and shinier than the last thing—more unexpected, more esoteric, more interesting.
The downside of having so many ideas all the time is, of course, that I’ll never have time for all of them. But it can hard to choose between different projects, and part of the whole attention-deficit thing is losing interest in ideas fairly quickly once they stop being new or engaging. This leaves me with dozens upon dozens of scraps and sketches barely begun, or left half-outlined. My notebooks are a veritable graveyard of abandoned ideas, and I have virtual sheaves of Word documents that concur.
Quite often, the most difficult part of starting a new writing project is that jump from “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” to active progression. There are a lot of tricks out there for effective self-motivation, and this isn’t that sort of publication, so I won’t start promoting any particular strategy here, but I will say that with creative writing, specifically, I get a lot of mileage out of raising the stakes. Writing for a specific purpose, especially when I have deadlines and people waiting to read it, makes me a lot more excited to get stuck into a project.
Focus and follow-through
Both of these things are challenging for me, as I’m sure you will have guessed. Being easily distracted and easily bored makes it difficult to finish any kind of writing longer than a sonnet or a piece of flash fiction, so I’ve needed to learn strategies for pushing through.
One major thing that I’ve found helpful for focusing is having a dedicated “work zone” that is distinct from the rest of my environment. At the moment, my work zone is my desk in the home office; after spending a couple of years using that desk for postgrad study and sometimes working from home during lockdowns, I’ve become very accustomed to it. Before the desk, I did the majority of my writing at the public library, which I think is an excellent space for it:
There’s enough people around that I’m more aware of what I’m doing and how I appear, which makes me more likely to curtail particularly distracting behaviours, but the other patrons aren’t generally doing much that makes them distractions themselves.
There’s free wi-fi available if I need it.
I feel totally comfortable about spending an entire afternoon there, and not at all obligated to buy anything!
I can pick up new reading material at the same time.
As well as picking a good place, I can help myself get into a productive headspace by stimulating my other senses (in a controlled way). Usually, I do this by cranking up some high-energy tunes and making sure I have some different snacks to hand, along with something to drink. I want to make sure I’m comfortable, and not pressure myself if my brain isn’t cooperating. If I’m not having a great brain day, the best thing I can do is cut myself a break; pushing myself to keep slogging doesn’t result in good work (if any work), and it stresses me out, so unless I’m on an urgent deadline it just isn’t worth it.
Keeping up with projects in the long term requires some additional figuring out. I need to make time to work on them, prioritise them. When my health and my schedule allow it, I set aside regular days to focus on my writing. I may not make a lot of progress on a given day, but having a large block of time set aside at frequent(-ish) intervals gives me space to let my creativity direct itself without stressing about word count, and the structure helps me make a habit of it.
Flexibility and gentleness does not, however, remove me from accountability. One thing that seems pretty common amongst the ADHD community is that we tend to work much more effectively against a deadline; we’re rubbish with internal motivation, but external motivators give us the nudge we need! And along with deadlines comes the pressure of other people. That, if I’m honest, is my strongest motivation: someone specific (whom I like and respect) is depending on me to write this thing so that they can read it, and I really, really don’t want to let them down. (If you’re observant, you’ll realise that such is the whole premise behind this Substack… so thank you subscribers for keeping my writing wheels rolling!)
The subject matter
I’ve given a lot of words now to how I write with ADHD, but what I write is also affected. Now, this is where I get really specific to my own special flavour of neurodivergence—I know plenty of other ADHD writers with the opposite preferences and difficulties to those I have.
A good example of this is length: many of my fellows get onto a story and don’t want to shut up about it, and next thing you know they have a 100k-word novel on their hands. I, on the other hand, find that my short attention span usually wins out over enthusiasm, so I gave up on novels a long time ago in favour of short stories and plays.
Another way in which my projects of choice are guided by my ADHD tendencies is in their variety. Many writers, generally speaking, find a niche they like and stick with it for a while before moving on, if they move on at all. Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and Isaac Asimov certainly knew a good thing when they saw it! But a niche can get comfortable and familiar, and that’s not really my jam. Remember how I’m really driven by novelty? That applies to genres too. I’ve written personal essays, detective stories, sonnets, a postmodern short story that was quite good but will absolutely never be repeated, a farce, surrealist absurdism, a Restoration-era-based comedy, cosy jazz-era urban fantasy, and all sorts of things that are harder to categorise. I don’t often write the same kind of piece more than once, especially not in a short time-frame. I get captivated by a new genre, with new techniques to play with, and new conventions to turn upside down, and I’m hooked.
Once I get hooked, the fun gets started. And when I say “fun”, I mean “series of overly ambitious choices stacked up on one another like some sort of Scooby-Doo sandwich”. Because that’s how I have fun (nerd).
To combat the utter nihilistic apathy that is a bored ADHD brain, I have a very well-ingrained habit of making things more complex than they may strictly need to be. Did I need my Master’s project to be twice the initial recommended length, in a genre I didn’t know very well before starting, with multiple original songs and a found poem in a language I don’t speak? Absolutely not. Did I have some regrets halfway through the writing process when I was up to my eyeballs in scene drafts? Perhaps. But was it also really, really satisfying to pull it off in the end? You betcha! And I was also so much more invested in the process because of the challenge involved. See? Totally worth it!
It’s a pattern that repeats itself in all my cognitive pursuits—I seek out new and stimulating challenges because that’s important to me as a way to engage my creativity and motivation. I funnel all my ambition into writing projects with lots of technical complexity and amuse myself in the depths of literary nuts and bolts. I have to be deliberate about making my ideas come to fruition, and rely on the support and encouragement from those around me to keep me going. I would not be the person, or the writer, I am without the influence of my ADHD, and my experiences are something that I treasure as being unique to myself (even if they do make things harder for me).
Did you like this post? Did you find something fascinating in my prose? Please tell your friends about it and share the magic! (If you have other ADHD friends, maybe they’ll find it interesting too!)
How old were you when you were diagnosed, out of interest, Jojo? I was very late diagnosed. It would have been massively helpful, and saved me a lot of self judgement, had I known sooner! I was instead, as a teen, misdiagnosed with Borderline Personalty Disorder (a common misdiagnosis for ADHDers, apparently), and in my earlier years received a diagnosis of “receptive dysphasia” because I was very slow learning to speak (which, again, is apparently not uncommon among ADHDers).
I relate strongly to a lot of this! For me, ADHD mostly results in the accumulation of a lot of unfinished projects that never really got past the starting stage, but I also tend to enjoy writing long-form content more than I enjoy writing short-form content, so it's a constant struggle.