Writing with ADHD: Making the Most of Your Unique Brain
Maximising Creativity and Productivity Despite ADHD
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — nothing about that combination of words screams, “Writing is the perfect career for me!”
You struggle to sit still for long periods of time? Focusing on a single thing feels like pulling teeth? Oh, unless you’re hyper-fixating, but then you have no control over what you fixate on.
Who wouldn’t recommend to someone like that a job that involves sitting for hours in front of a screen, painstakingly typing?
The Difficulties of Writing with ADHD
No ADHD case is like every other. We all struggle and succeed differently. That being said, there are some recurring factors.
Chaos Gremlins
I bought a day planner last year, used it religiously for a week, and then never touched it again after the novelty wore off. No matter how much someone with ADHD might want to be organised, it’s often impossible.
And writing is a task that requires organisation.
- A plotter-type writer needs to know everything about the story or article before they start writing.
- A panster writes by the seat of their pants, no preparations required. But even a panster needs structure, if not while writing, then at least when editing.
Oh, Look a Bird
Everything is distracting. ADHD brains seek stimulation like a rat hitting the pleasure button until it dies.
Because the ADHD brain underproduces dopamine, it’s always on the hunt for it, and that’s inconvenient for those wanting to focus on a task that lasts longer than a few minutes, like writing.
As I Was Saying
People with ADHD tend to be excellent problem-solvers and forward-thinkers because the ADHD brain works quickly, so quickly that it isn’t always easy to keep up with.
The ADHD brain will hop tracks and go off on tangents that make sense to it, but not necessarily to others. Sometimes it won’t even complete its initial thought.
In writing, this can make articles or stories difficult for readers to follow.
Shiny!
People with ADHD are like magpies, but instead of collecting all that glitters, they collect projects.
New ideas are fun. They’re exciting. They reek of potential.
So long as they remain ideas, the promises they hold of fulfilment and dopamine make the person with ADHD feel great. But when those ideas turn into actual projects that require actual work? Thanks, but no. The dopamine is all gone.
Please Don’t Make Me
ADHD is all for the big picture and isn’t so keen about getting bogged down with details.
Yet writing is a detail-oriented craft. If you’re writing an article, you’ve got to be specific. If you’re writing a novel, you’ve got to build a detailed plot, detailed characters, a detailed setting — it’s a lot.
Huh?
People with ADHD are forgetful. Their working memory (eg. remembering spoken instructions or where they put their keys) struggles to encode information, which can affect their long-term memory (eg. remembering their childhood).
With writing, it can be difficult to remember what you’ve already written or what you’re supposed to be writing.
The Big Sad
Emotional dysregulation is common in people with ADHD. Because the ADHD brain works so quickly and is so easily distracted, it often doesn’t give its owner the opportunity to process emotions when they happen. Plus, it struggles to articulate and identify emotions.
Emotions also tend to feel more intense for people with ADHD; they have stronger reactions to both the positive and the negative, but because of the dysregulation, their reactions can be delayed.
It makes recalling emotions difficult, which is a real drawback, especially in fiction writing.
Four Famous ADHD Writers
The flaws and skills these writers have are not indisputably caused by ADHD. Writers without ADHD can make the same mistakes and achieve the same successes, but for argument’s sake, let’s look through them.
Jules Verne
Though he was never officially diagnosed, it’s commonly accepted that Jules Verne had ADHD.
This is the man who wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, among others.
His imagination was prophetic at times and his writing never lacked detail, but I’ve never connected with any of his characters. They’ve always felt like vessels through which to explore the story world and its concepts, never like people I could root for.
It’s like he forgot to give them more than surface-level emotions.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, author of the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot books and many others, had dysgraphia, which causes distorted and incorrect writing and often goes hand-in-hand with ADHD.
She knew so much about poisons and included them so realistically in her books that it helped the police catch serial killer Graham Frederick Young.
I find her work unreadable.
As with Jules Verne, her characters feel more like plot points than people, devices through which to create and solve a crime. There’s no emotion, either in them or in her writing style.
Ernest Hemingway
There’s no official diagnosis here either, only a common belief that two-time Nobel Prize winner and great American author, Ernest Hemingway, had ADHD.
Though not a man I would have liked to spend much time with, Hemingway was an exceptional writer.
His clean and restrained writing style lent power to every sentence. He mastered the art of implication, and he understood people. His characters aren’t all likeable, but they are all human and beautifully complex.
If you’re having doubts about what your ADHD brain can produce in the way of writing, read anything Hemingway published.
Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig wrote the film scripts for Lady Bird, Little Women, Barbie (which she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach), and others.
She shared in an interview a few months ago her recent diagnosis and explained how ADHD has helped her as a writer: the enthusiasm, the multitude of interests, the great imagination, and the deep feelings.
ADHD won’t automatically make you a brilliant writer — nothing will. But neither does it mean you’ll be awful at it.
ADHD Tips to Make Writing Easier
All brains are different, and some of these tips may work for you while others might only work some of the time or never.
Writing
- Learn to type quickly. Or use a speech-to-text app. Your brain doesn’t like slowness, so avoid it.
- Sprint. This means setting a timer and writing. Maybe give yourself a word goal. Sprinting with an intended word count combines two of the five ADHD motivating factors that I mention at the end of this article:
- Do it every day. Habits likely don’t come easily to you, so unless you do something every day, you might forget about it.
- Ditch your phone. Put it on the other side of the room, out of your direct line of sight and make sure it’s on silent. You can also download an app on your computer that will stop you from accessing unhelpful websites.
- Keep your desk tidy. Mess is a visual distraction.
- Use a body double. Find someone to work in the same room as you or do it over Zoom. Just having my dog in the same room helps me.
- Outline your work. It’s hit-or-miss. Sometimes it works great; sometimes it’s overwhelming. Do whatever helps on the day.
- Write out of order. I hate this technique for novel writing but love it for article writing. Forget about chronology. Write whichever section you’re most excited about and get to the rest later.
In Case of Writer’s Block
- Go for a walk. Move. Release some of that energy. Better yet, go for a walk every day regardless of writer’s block.
- Test a new routine. The last time I was stuck, I tried a bunch of different writing routines from published authors, sticking to one routine for a week and then switching.
- Forget about writing for a few days. If the block isn’t shifting, focus on something else. It is so easy for people with ADHD to burn out and “pushing through it” is the worst advice.
Editing
- Do it as you go. Once upon a time (up until two months ago), I couldn’t write a sentence without reading it and editing it about five times, which messed with my productivity. Then I saw a TikTok by jackspiess.author. His advice is to write for 20 minutes, take a 5-minute break, edit for 10 minutes, take another 5-minute break, back to writing for 20 minutes, and so on.
- Read your writing as it’s being read to you. Reading my stuff out loud doesn’t work for me, but if I listen to someone or a website read it and I read it at the same time, I find editing to be a lot easier.
Writing may not be a “perfect on paper” match for people with ADHD, but it is perfect regardless for a lot of us, and a few setbacks shouldn’t stop us from doing what we love.