In the Mind of an ADHD Writer

Some might not call me a “real” writer. I don’t write every day (although I’m always thinking about writing something). I don’t make a living off of my writing (although I do make money). And I’m certainly not on any best-seller lists. I don’t even have a huge social media following.

All those things seem to be, at least in part, the measurement of a “real” writer. At least these days.

It wasn’t always like that, though. In the old days, people were writers as long as they wrote. It was expected that writers wrote, even though the money wasn’t there, even though no one was reading their words. If you wrote at least sometimes, you were a writer.

ADHD makes me question myself

If you have ADHD, you know what I’m talking about here. I have these ideas of what I should be to be a “real” writer. Some of it is the stuff I just mentioned. But there are other things, too. Things that plague me and torment me.

My ADHD brain tells me that if I want to be a “real” writer, I should pick a genre and stick with it. I should write romance or drama or even smutty stories and focus on that one thing. That’s what “real” writers do.

But do they really?

Neil Gaiman is a great example of a writer that doesn’t stick to one genre. He’s written fantasy and urban fantasy, supernatural, horror, and young adult.

Ian McEwan writes romance, humor, and espionage.

Are they able to pull this off only because they are famous? Or is it possible to write in multiple genres under one pen name?

I think that if the genres are vastly different (like explicit steamy romance and clean romance) it’s necessary to write under different names.

But this is marketing.

What about time? How do you write in different genres and manage your time? Because this is the big thing for me. I get bored easily and I don’t want to write the same thing all the time!

How to manage the ideas

That’s the other thing that my ADHD brain won’t settle down with. No matter what I do, the ideas just keep coming. If I could find the time and energy to write every story, every article, every poem that I had an idea for, I’d definitely be rich.

I can’t even tell you how many stories and articles and poems I’ve started. I might have a rough draft of them down, but then I get a new idea and I have to get that down. Even when I try to just jot down a few lines, enough to keep the gist of the idea, the idea gets stuck in my head and I can’t go back to the thing I was doing in the first place.

Sometimes, I can get up and go for a short walk and get refocused on the original piece I was working on. But more often than not, that walk just spurns more ideas.

If I could make money selling my ideas, I’d be golden. And trust me, I have considered just selling plot outlines of stories. But that kind of feels like selling my babies and I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I’m not writing this to complain about ADHD. I actually kind of dig my ADHD brain because it is so incredibly different from other people’s brains. I love the creativity of my brain. Plus, I’m empathetic and non-judgemental and a lot of other good things that I attribute to having ADHD.

But I’d really love it if I could settle down in my brain and get some stories and articles finished.

Do you ever feel like this? If you’re an ADHD writer, I’d really like to hear how to manage it!