Me, Creativity, and My ADD…

…or why it takes me so long to finish a story.

Yup, I am coming out. I have ADD, and with my problem, I have great days, good days, and days where nothing gets done. I am not medicated. How does ADD affect a writer?

You have noticed by now there are a LOT of unfinished stories and a couple that are done. Having ADD is like having a browser open with 20 tabs, all with notifications and that annoying video you can’t find. When it is at its worst, I can’t concentrate on anything and wind up clicking on Twitter, YouTube, and other things constantly, and watching YouTube becomes an exercise in getting impatient watching the video and clicking on another, which means I don’t watch more than about three minutes before I get up and walk around only to repeat the process. It’s frustrating to me, especially when I know I have projects hanging over my head, and they need to get done.
I will start working on a project and then flip to another one, not taking the time to do a quick edit.

Writing Challenges…

When I write anything, this includes social media posts, my mind will race with what I have to say to the point where my mind will put in words while I type that aren’t there when I hit send. This is a nightmare when I write stories and posts. I LITERALLY have to read the post out loud, whether to someone else or not, to make sure it makes sense, because if I read it quietly, I will NEVER find the problem. As you can image, I have lost a client or two due to me not seeing the missing word or words. This happens with punctuation as well.
It makes me want to pull my hair out.
It also finishes a sentence before I am done typing it. I know your brain moves faster than your fingers, but my eyes and my brain conspire so I see the sentence completed when it is actually not. It’s maddening. There are times I go back to edit and think, “What the heck was I trying to say here? Good grief, my grammar sucks.”

I HAVE to get it down…

If I have an idea, I have to write it down or record it. If I decide to sleep on it, it’s gone when I wake up. I can’t count the number of times I made my mind, through meditation, hush so I could sleep only to wake up angry at myself because I can’t remember ANY of the ideas that popped into my head the night before.

I forget it when I write it down…

Once I have written something down, I forget it. It’s like the page is my trash can and I am tossing my stories, poems, and other disjointed thoughts onto it. I have lost so many poems due to screwy hard drives and stolen notebooks.
This may sound crazy, but all my stories and poems are my babies, and it hurts when I lose one and can’t remember how it to recreate it. (Waits for the comments telling her she’s nuts.)

I fight with myself constantly…

I set goals for myself and wind up frustrated at myself when I have a horrible day. Those bad days make it difficult to keep up with challenges, like this one, and others as well.

When I am on it, I am ON IT…

ADD isn’t all scatter-brained and not being able to finish anything. I get hyper-focused, and it feels like a rush. I get started and don’t stop until I am done with what I am doing.
The only down side is I tend to get irritated when someone or something interrupts me or when something isn’t working out the way I think it should. This upsets my husband, who has figured out how to snap me out of it, bless him.

Do you any of you guys have these problems? Do you have ADD? Even if you don’t, let me know how you get through a creative day.

Until Next Time,
Anissa “Maddy” Walker