Rewiring My Writing Brain

 I've always struggled with the way my brain works.  Some days everything is perfectly linear - all straight lines that make sense.  Then there are other days where my brain feels like chaos.  Up until this year, I just thought this was normal, but then I was diagnosed with autism & ADHD.  I've known people with ADHD who epitomized the hyperactive aspect of what I thought ADHD was.  It's been an eye-opening experience to go through it myself and find out exactly how ADHD has affected me personally.

The "H" in my diagnosis is more hyper-focused driven.  When I am interested in something, I want to know EVERYTHING about that specific thing: kpop, history, Greek mythology, gaming, k-dramas...the list goes on and on.  Instead of getting the gist of something, I want to get all of the details my brain can compute.  In some ways this is great, especially for writing purposes, because 99.9% of the time, a topic will come up that I've focused on before and I can usually pull something useful.

But dealing with this is also incredibly overwhelming.  A manager I once worked with described it best when she said that having autism and ADHD combined is like having an overanalytical perfectionist on one shoulder and a complete chaos demon on the other who are constantly at war.  It makes staying on track incredibly difficult for me sometimes.

My therapist says that it's not unusual for people with this diagnosis to feel this way.  Since I lived for 48 years without any sort of medication, I didn't want to be medicated once I was diagnosed.  Not that there's anything wrong with being medicated.  I know a lot of people who are and it's helped them a lot.  My biggest fear with getting medicated, especially for the ADHD, is losing my creativity.  I know a lot of people whose creativity either tanked or changed completely after they began taking medication and the idea of that scares me.  Creativity is really the only thing I have and the idea of losing that or having it change significantly would be like losing a limb.

What does this have to do with writing and rewiring my brain?  That is an excellent question.  When I started working on my novel, I tried very hard to write in a linear fashion like you would expect.  Prologue, chapter one, etc., but then my brain just...froze.  It felt like I was a deer on a road on a dark night being frozen by headlights and I realized at that moment that my brain just does not work in a linear fashion.  So, I gave myself permission to ignore all of the amazing advice that's been provided out in the world about how you need to write from point A to point Z and am writing from point P to A to Z, at least for draft one.  I think writing the scenes that are in my head for each piece will be my best bet to get through my first draft and then when I start on draft two, I can start making them work cohesively.  Will this work?  I have absolutely no idea.  

It's scary to try something you've always wanted to do, only to find out that you're not cut out to be a "normal" author and that the way you do it goes against pretty much any and all writing advice out there in the big bad world of publishing.  Will I finish?  I hope so.  All I can say, if you ever come across this, is wish me luck.  I'm going to need it.