Writing with ADHD can be tough. It’s easy to beat yourself up for being “undisciplined” or “lazy” when the greater problem is that you’re trying to work against your ADHD instead of finding ways to make it work for you. It’s like swimming against a rip current instead of swimming sideways to get out of it.
In the last month, I’ve made a really fantastic breathrough that I think will change the way I write from here on out. So far, it’s helped me to double or even triple my usual word count. The novel I’ve been wrestling with for more than a year now—the longest one I’ve written since I started indie publishing—now looks like it will be finished in just a few of weeks, when I expected it to take a couple of months. Needless to say, I’m really excited.
What changed? I found a way to make my ADHD work for me, rather than against me.
In my previous post, A reading hack for the ADHD addled brain, I explained how I exploited my ADHD to read more books. Basically, I did the same thing, but for writing. There was a lot that had to happen first, though, and the biggest of those was that I had to learn how to make and keep an outline.
Step 1: Learn how to outline properly
For years, I just sort of assumed that I was a discovery writer, probably because of the ADHD. Most of creativity has to do with finding novel or unexpected ways to combine two or more ideas, and when you have ADHD, your brain naturally jumps from idea to idea. That was why I always hated taking meds when I was a kid: I felt that it stifled my creativity. And since most of this idea jumping happened subconsciously, I assumed that outlining would also kill that process.
But after a few years of struggling as an indie author, I realized that my writing process was too slow. In order to succeed, I needed to publish more frequently, but in order to do that, I needed to produce more content regularly. Back then, I would usually write a novel from start to finish, laying it aside for a month or two if I ran into a serious block, and also after finishing each draft. A typical novel would go through two or three revision drafts, so it would literally take years before a +70k word novel was ready to publish.
I decided that the best way to shorten my writing process was to “cycle” through the book, combining all the drafts so that I was working on revisions while simultaneously writing the rough draft. In order to keep track of all that, I needed to keep an outline. So I tried out a few different methods and tweaked them until I came up with a method that worked well for me.
The thought of outlining can scare a lot of writers who consider themselves “pantsers” or “discover writers,” but the thing to keep in mind is that there is no one right way to keep an outline. In fact, there are probably as many ways to outline as there are writers. For some, a couple of quick sketches on the back of a napkin is enough, while for others, it turns into a massive story bible that’s just as long (or longer) than the actual book. But without trying out a lot of different methods, you’ll never figure out what works for you.
It took me a couple of years, but I eventually developed a method that worked really well for me. With it, I was able to write Edenfall and The Stars of Redemption, as well as the last two Gunslinger books, in much less time than it took for my other ones. I was also able to combine all eight of the Star Wanderers novellas into a novel—something I probably wouldn’t have been able to do very well without a solid outline to keep it straight.
But I still would run into blocks that would occasionally derail the project, at least for a little while. I ran into that a lot with my current WIP, Children of the Starry Sea. Sometimes, they were genuine story problems that I needed to work through. More often than not, though, the problem was one of momentum: I was having too many bad writing days interspersed with the good writing days, so that each day felt like I was starting from zero. After a while, that becomes difficult to keep up.
Step 2: Allow yourself to write out of order
When I came back from my second hiatus to work on Children of the Starry Sea, it was clear that my new method wasn’t working as well as I needed it to work. Children of the Starry Sea is much longer than anything I’ve published so far, and I found that I just wasn’t producing enough new words consistently to make my “cycling” process of revisions work.
Around this time, I remembered something I’d heard on a recent convention panel, where one of the authors shared how he collaborated with another author. Instead of going back and forth, he told his cowriter: “how about you just write all the odd chapters, and I’ll write the even chapters, and when we’re both done we’ll combine it all together and see how it turns out.” To their surprise, it actually turned out really well.
So with that in mind, I decided to experiment with skipping around my current WIP, rather than writing it in order from start to finish. If I woke up and felt like I wanted to write an action scene, I would pick one of the action scenes out of my outline and write that. If I felt like I wanted to write the ending, I would skip ahead and write that. If I felt like I wanted to write the next scene, I would go back to where I’d left off and write that.
The outline was the key. Without it, there’s no way I’d be able to keep everything straight and know where each part is supposed to go. The outline also had the added benefit of dividing the novel up into smaller chunks, making the overall project much less intimidating. The way to eat an elephant is to take one bite at a time, just like the way to climb a mountain is to take one step at a time. Same thing with novels.
That’s all well and good, you may be thinking, but what happens when you’ve written all the stuff that you want to write, and all that’s left is the stuff you didn’t want to write? Isn’t that a bit like eating your dessert first, and leaving your vegetables for last? Not really, because chances are that if you really don’t want to write a particular scene, the reader probably won’t want to read it either. So if you can find a way to rework your story so that scene becomes unnecessary, you’re probably better off doing that.
But I actually haven’t had that problem yet. The thing about ADHD is that it actually feels right to jump around all over the place like that. Just because I don’t want to write a particular scene on one day doesn’t mean that I won’t want to come back to it sometime later. And more often than not, writing a later scene actually makes things fall into place with the earlier scenes, and makes me more excited to write them.
It’s as if the project itself is a puzzle. Can you imagine trying to put a puzzle together in linear order, starting from the top left corner and moving to the bottom right? That would be pure torture! Instead, you pick up whatever pieces catch your eye, and try to fit them in with other, similar pieces, until the puzzle itself begins to take shape.
There a lot of disadvantages to writing with ADHD, but there are some areas where the ADHD can actually become a strength, if you learn to work with it instead of against it. I’ve already mentioned how it can help with creativity, since your mind is always bouncing around between different ideas. What I’ve learned in the last month is that writing out of order is another great way to harness ADHD as a strength, since something that leaps out from writing one scene can often lead to a breakthrough in another. Writing out of order gives your ADHD brain the space it needs to make those intuitive leaps, and harnesses the “oh, shiny!” toward something productive, rather than driving you to procrastinate.
Step 3: Start in the middle, not the beginning
For me, the hardest part of writing is getting started. That’s probably my ADHD: it’s always easier to get distracted than it is to settle down and do what you’re supposed to do. Once I’ve settled down, though, and gotten into a groove, I can usually stick with a task until it’s done. In fact, once you’re in something of a flow state, the ADHD can actually make you hyperfocus.
So if the hardest part of writing is getting started, how do you turn that from a weakness into a strength? By leaving the next scene(s) unfinished, so that the next time you sit down to write, the scene has already been started and you just need to figure out the next word. One word leads to the next, and before you know it, you’re in the groove again.
By far, this has been the biggest part of my breakthrough: realizing that I don’t have to write every scene from start to finish in one sitting. In fact, it’s better if I don’t. Instead, I’ll typically finish one or two scenes in the morning, then pick out three to four scenes in the afternoon and write the first couple hundred words or so, deliberately leaving them unfinished so that I have a variety of scenes to choose from the next day.
If the hardest part of writing is getting started, then the hardest part of getting started is feeling overwhelmed at how much you have to do. But if all I have to do is write a couple hundred words, that’s easy! It also works with my ADHD instead of against it, since I get to jump from scene to scene instead of getting bogged down.
With the way that I used to write, most of my “writing blocks” had less to do with the actual writing and more to do with working myself up to write. Many times, I found that if I just sat down and opened up my WIP without thinking too much about it first, the writing would come a lot easier. Starting in the middle is a great way to harness that, because you aren’t confronted with a blank page the moment you sit down. It takes a lot less effort to find the next word than it does to find the first word.
So with where things stand right now, I just need to start four new scenes every day this week and I’ll have every remaining scene in my novel WIP started by Saturday. From there, if I can finish two or three scenes a day, I can easily finish the rough draft stage of this novel WIP before the end of February—which will be amazing, since I’m only at the 65% mark right now, and historically that’s always the part where I find it most difficult to write.
I’m really looking forward to writing a whole novel from start to finish using this method. As soon as Children of the Starry Sea is finished, I’ll start outlining the sequel, Return of of the Starborn Son, and write it the same way. If things go well with my current WIP, I’ll be very optimistic about finishing the next one before the end of the year—perhaps even before the end of the summer.
I do expect things to get crazy around here soon, though. Our second child is due in the early spring, which means enduring a month or two of chronic sleep deprivation. I’ve gotten to be pretty comfortable with writing at 4AM, but we’re also getting a lot more uninterrupted sleep than we were when Princess Hiccup was a newborn. I anticipate that we’ll have at least a month where nothing gets productively done.
So it will be really fantastic if I can finish Children of the Starry Sea NOW, before the baby comes—and not just the rough draft, but the revisions too. Fortunately, I don’t think I’ll have too much difficulty with the revisions. I’ve already cycled through the first half of the book a couple of times, and it’s working pretty well. Also, revisions come a lot easier to me than writing new words. I’m not sure why that’s true, but it is.
And for the record, I don’t advocate jumping around all over the place while doing revisions. It’s probably best to do that part in sequential order, if nothing else than to make sure that all the scenes and chapters flow properly. I haven’t gotten to that part of this writing method yet, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. So far, the stuff I’ve cycled through actually seems to flow pretty well, but I need to take it from the beginning to really be sure.