Writing When You Have ADHD, Part I
An Autobiography
I am a person who has ADHD. This is an indisputable fact. A psychologist diagnosed me and a psychiatrist sends my medication for it to the pharmacy every 30 days. People who have just met me will sometime notice, it’s so obvious, and will say, “Do you think you might have ADHD?” Friend, I am the most ADHD-having person you will meet this week.
Medication is great. I support taking medication if it’s indicated for anybody who has ADHD. However: I don’t take my ADHD medication every day. I take it on most workdays, but not on light workdays or weekends. This is because my medication is a stimulant and (1) I don’t want the effectiveness to wear off over time and (2) I like to take naps on weekends.
So anyway I do a lot of my writing without the assistance of my medication. Also: I was not diagnosed until I was an adult in my thirties, so I spent a good three fourths of my life thus far getting by without medication for ADHD.
All this is to say I have picked up a lot of strategies for coping with ADHD without the help of medication. I have all kinds of tips and tricks up my sleeve. I break them out several days each week so I can keep functioning even when I’m not on amphetamines.
Writing is really, really hard to do when you have ADHD. This is because writing is a self-directed activity that requires executive function and focus and because writing aspirations and plans can be completely derailed by procrastination. Problems with focus, executive function, task organization, motivation, self-direction, and procrastinating are all hallmarks of ADHD.
Medication isn’t an option for everyone. I have a diagnosis and great doctors and health insurance and I still can’t get my medication a lot of the time thanks to supply chain issues. Whatever the reason somebody has for not taking the magical focus pills, the reason is the reason.
Today’s Shelf Life and next Tuesday’s Part II comprise a brief and, I hope, helpful guide to doing creative writing even when you have ADHD, even when it’s unmedicated and rampaging and sitting down to do quiet brain work seems impossible. I have five tips—three today, two Tuesday—you can put to use right away, that require no drugs, to get writing and keep writing even when your brain is crawling up the inside of your skull.
The only thing you will need for these is an accountabilibuddy (any friend will do if they’ll hold you to task).
Create a Pressure Prompt
When someone identifies themself as “a procrastinator” I tell them what I myself was told by a kind mentor—I challenge them to turn around their thinking about themself and identify as a “pressure-prompted person” instead. For one thing, “pressure-prompted person” doesn’t have the negative connotations that “procrastinator” does. I mean, who doesn’t like to brag that they work well under pressure?
Folks with ADHD are often pressure-prompted people, which can be mistaken for procrastination. For those of us with ADHD, a task that is overwhelming (hard, scary, complex) or boring can feel literally impossible to do. It feels like nothing you do can make you start this task. Every other task will climb past it on your to-do list. It will never rise to the top of the to-do list—you’ll always promote something ahead of it.
Until someone with authority comes along and prompts you to do it with either a carrot (reward) or a stick (threat). Pressure prompts the person with ADHD to get tasks done; we often do them very efficiently and quickly once we get moving. It’s getting us moving that’s hard.
Fake, self-imposed deadlines will not work for smart people with ADHD. You can give yourself all the deadlines you want but if you’re only accountable to yourself those deadlines are infinitely flexible (and ignorable). What am I going to do? Fire myself for missing my own fake deadline? Yes, please fire me from this boring task, self. I don’t want to do it anyway.
Enter your accountabilibuddy. Find someone who agrees to work with you on your writing. This could be a friend or family member, a fellow writer who also needs accountability, or a even a writing coach. The plan: Tell them what you will have for them to review and when. Commit. Ask them to set aside time to review your stuff. I have found that myself and my fellow ADHD-havers are more than willing to put ourselves under insane pressure but also strive to protect others from the insane pressure we can create by delaying.
Use your ethicality and your compassion to your advantage. Create a pressure prompt by committing to someone else to accomplish some writing. Ask them to hold you accountable to following through.
Organize Your Plan
Task organization is another challenge for people with ADHD. It’s not unusual to find yourself with more ideas you want to work on than time to work on them. You might find yourself with copious notes about character and plot and no idea how to actually start the draft. You may ask yourself: How did I get here? ADHD. ADHD is how you got here.
Lists are an the ADHD-haver’s best friend. Too many ideas to figure out where to start? Great, make a list of all your ideas. (Put them in your idea bucket.) Once you have a list, you can put that list in some kind of priority order. What’s most exciting? What’s easiest? Give them lower numbers. Less exciting? More complex? Give them higher numbers. Once you have something at number one on your list, you have an action plan.
It’s helpful for me to keep a running list of writing and writing-related tasks I need to do. There’s always something that needs drafting, editing, submitting to a magazine, sending out to the beta readers, researching, plotting, outlining, and so on. You know how you made the idea list of all your ideas? Now make a task list of all your tasks. You can start with the tasks you know you’ll have to do for each project—for instance, if you want to outline, then draft, then edit every chapter and then cycle each chapter out to a beta reader, that’s four tasks for each chapter. It’s fine if your list looks like:
Outline chapter 1
Draft chapter 1
Review chapter 1
Chapter 1 out to beta
Outline chapter 2
Draft chapter 2
Review chapter 2
Chapter 2 out to beta
And so on. . . .
You don’t have to do the things from your list in order. It’s just helpful to have a list you can cross things off as you do them. Nothing motivates me quite like crossing something off a list.
Remember: The first item on your to-do list should always be “make to-do list” so you can cross something off right away.
Practice Fake Focus
People with ADHD have a hard time focusing on tasks, except when we’re hyperfocusing, which I’ll get to later. For now just understand that I understand that focusing is impossible.
You can fake it till you make it, like with confidence (that 100 percent works). The premise behind “fake it till you make it” is that when you fake it you actually do the thing. Then once you have actually done the thing you know from empirical evidence that you can do the thing. Here’s what it looks like to do this with focus.
First, understand what takes away from your focus. Is it your phone? Social media? Video games? Texting the group chat? Looking at Reddit? These are all the things that take away from my focus, personally. Your mileage may vary.
Second, set yourself an amount of focus time that is achievable. My tattoo artist says five minutes is the amount of time that someone can stand “anything.” When they are four hours into a big colorwork piece on me and I’m dying, they remind me: “Just do five more minutes, you can stand anything for five minutes.” Then after five minutes they’re like, “Look you just did five minutes. You can do five more minutes.” And then eventually we’re done and I didn’t die.
So let’s say five minutes.
Sit down in front of your writing task with a timer set for that amount of time: Five minutes. Be physically away from your distractions. For instance, leave your phone in another room. If your distractions are available on your laptop, don’t use your laptop. Use a notebook and pen. Set your timer for five minutes—the length of time for which a human can endure anything. Now write for five minutes. Or don’t! You can just sit there and look at your paper if you want. Don’t get up and grab your phone. Don’t navigate to Reddit. Don’t doodle on your paper. Write or don’t write, but don’t do anything else either.
It’s fine if you don’t write anything. When your five minutes are up, you’re free. Go look at Reddit while playing video games and texting the group chat. Take another five minutes of focus another time.
Here’s what will happen if you stick with it. You will eventually come to realize it’s more painful to sit and stare at your paper for five minutes than it is to just write for five minutes. Writing for five minutes makes the time go faster. You will learn to focus on writing for five minutes at a time. From there, it’s just a matter of extending the time. When five minutes is a piece of cake, try ten. Try fifteen.
Before you know it your tattoo or your short story will be finished and you’ll have something to feel good about.
Make sure you come back next Tuesday for the thrilling conclusion of this Shelf Life two-parter, with indispensable tips on creating a dopamine machine and harnessing your hyperfocus.
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