Video

Writers With ADHD: Strategies for Navigating the Writing Process

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From Writers Helping Writers:

Earlier this year, I received an email from Bret Wieseler, requesting, “I would love to see a post about writers with ADHD. If you’ve never struggled with it yourself, maybe you know someone who has and can share their thoughts, methods, management strategies, etc. You offer such great insight into the many aspects of being a writer. I’m sure some of your readers, like myself, who struggle with ADHD would appreciate any advice you could offer.”

I immediately knew who to call on, and I am excited to share a guest post today from a writer who has been a part of my own journey almost from the very beginning. Johne Cook and I met on an online writing forum over 15 years ago, and he remains one of my favorite people to have entered my life in this journey. I have long admired his pragmatism, his insight, and his general cool in the face of the Internet’s insanity. To this day, I will often ask myself, “What would Johne do here?”

He has always been open about his experience as a writer with ADHD—both the challenges and his solutions for overcoming them. Today, I’m excited to have the opportunity to let him share his experience, tips, and resources with you.

Discovery

I wish I knew then what I know now.

For my first 45 years, I thought I was broken: I was a daydreamer, I couldn’t focus on things everyone else thought were important, I fidgeted when I should have been focusing, and I focused intently on the wrong things when people wanted my attention elsewhere.

It’s not like there weren’t clues. I excelled as part of an award-winning marching band in high school where marching in unison was expected, but it was like I was out of step with society.

I had difficulties with organization, time management, and sustaining attention in non-stimulating environments.

I couldn’t make important decisions to save my life. I kept putting things off. I had health problems, money problems, interpersonal problems.

I waited until the 11th hour to begin anything important, and things frequently fell through the cracks.

When I was young, what I wanted most was to be “normal.” But the older I got, the more I believed that was never my reality or calling.

Everything changed the day I heard a piece on NPR called “Adult ADHD in the Workplace.” As they discussed what ADHD was and shared six basic questions, I realized I checked five of the six boxes. They shared a link to a website, and I double-checked my results when I got home.

And then I met with a doctor and confirmed the diagnosis. My entire identity changed.

When I tried two different medications that gave me additional focus at the expense of my creativity (and some other small side effects), I sensed, for the first time, that my creativity was somehow tied to my condition. I valued my ability to sling words, see patterns, and make intuitive leaps that others around me couldn’t.

Because I valued my creativity, I ultimately handled my ADHD through other means that I’ll talk about below.

I realized I could either run from my ADHD or embrace it.

I decided to lean into it.

Communication

Knowing is half the battle. Knowing this about myself (and knowing that I was special, not broken) changed the way I saw everything.

I started by talking to my wife Linda and my family about what I was like and gradually increased my communication to include my boss and peers at work.

For some of them, what I told them was no surprise, and my biggest pleasant shock was how cool everyone was about it.

Finally, when appropriate, I shared about my ADHD with people I met out in the world. Letting people know what I was like set expectations and minimized confusion.

Once I had that handled, I moved on to the fun stuff.

ADHD as a Superpower

If attention deficit is the disorder, attention hyper-focus is my superpower.*

During the pandemic, Linda and I watched an interrupted season of The Amazing Race, mostly for Penn and Kim Holderness from YouTube’s The Holderness Family. It was only while watching the show that we learned that Penn was very ADHD. They referred to his ADHD as a superpower, and I saw with my own eyes how his ADHD helped him with pattern recognition, creative outside-the-box thinking, and hyper-focus during challenges.

And watching Penn at work on the show changed how I viewed my own ADHD.

In short, when managed effectively and embraced for its positive attributes, ADHD can empower writers to harness their inner strengths and achieve success in various domains of life.

Understanding ADHD in the Writing Process

People with ADHD exhibit different symptoms such as difficulty maintaining attention, hyperactivity, or impulsive behavior. For writers, these symptoms can manifest as challenges in organizing thoughts, staying on task, and completing projects.

However, it’s also associated with high levels of creativity, the ability to make unique connections, and a propensity for innovative thinking.

Challenges Faced by Writers With ADHD

(The following challenges are common but not universal.)

  • Distraction: Writing progress can be derailed by the lure of new ideas, social media, or even minor environmental changes.
  • Difficulty Organizing Thoughts: It can be daunting to translate a whirlwind of thoughts into coherent, structured writing.
  • Procrastination: Delaying writing tasks in favor of more immediately rewarding activities.
  • Impulsivity: Starting new projects without finishing current ones can lead to a cycle of uncompleted works.

Despite these challenges, many writers with ADHD have developed strategies to thrive.

Strategies and Tools for Writing with ADHD

I decided against medication. Once I took medication off the table, I began leaning harder on software tools to become more organized and to remind myself of important things.

Turning ADHD challenges into advantages requires a combination of personal strategies, environmental adjustments, and technology.

Linda and I are a team—she knows to prompt me to use my tech to capture ideas or thoughts in the moment, and I’ve become better at tracking my ideas by noting them in my phone or on my calendar.

Today, there are more tools available than ever.

Here are several approaches:

1. Structuring the Writing Environment

Minimize Distractions: Create a writing space with minimal visual and auditory distractions. Tools like noise-canceling headphones or apps that play white noise can help.

Establish Routines: Having a set writing schedule can provide structure and make it easier to start writing sessions.

2. Breaking Down Tasks

Use Lists and Outlines: Breaking writing projects into smaller, manageable tasks can make them less daunting. Outlining can also help organize thoughts before diving into writing.

Set Small Goals: Focus on short, achievable objectives, such as writing a certain number of words daily, to build momentum.

3. Leveraging Technology

Calendars: Google Calendar or Fantastical (MacOS only) free up my mind and keep me up-to-date.

Writing Software: Applications like Scrivener or Google Docs offer features to organize ideas, research, and drafts in one place.

Time Management Apps: Pomodoro timers or task management apps like Trello can help manage time and keep track of progress.

Pocket: A social bookmarking service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

SnagIt: A screenshot app on my computer where I capture and store screenshots in folders for later use. Also does optical character recognition (OCR) on text strings, allowing me to replicate URLs with copy/paste.

Note-taking apps: Apple Notes—my second mind that I can access from any of my Internet-connected devices.  Notion—a beefier app for more sophisticated note-taking

4. Embracing the Creative Process

Allow for Free Writing: Set aside time to write without worrying about coherence or structure. This can help capture creative ideas without the pressure of perfection.

Develop a System for Capturing Ideas: Use note-taking apps or carry a notebook to jot down ideas as they come, regardless of the time and place.

5. Seeking Support

Writing Groups: Joining a writing group or participating in writing challenges can provide accountability and motivation.

Professional Help: For some, working with a coach or therapist specializing in ADHD can offer personalized strategies and support.

Success Stories: Writers With ADHD

Many successful writers have ADHD and have spoken about how it affects their creative process. Writers emphasize the importance of embracing their non-linear thinking, and view it not as a hindrance, but as a source of creativity and originality:

Agatha Christie: The “Queen of Crime” was known for her prolific output and intricate plots. Some speculate that her energetic writing style and ability to focus intensely on details could be signs of ADHD.f

. . . .

John Irving: The author of The World According to Garp was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and has spoken about how his condition has both helped and hindered his writing process.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

The following are from The Holderness Family, mentioned in the OP:

Discussion: Language

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From MIT Open Courseware – Introduction to Psychology:

Session Overview

How do I move meaning from my mind to yours? 

Discussion

Language is just incredible – think about how easy it is for us, as babies, to learn our native language effortlessly, and yet how hard it is, once we’ve already learned a language, to learn another.

I think about this every time I see a Chinese baby speaking perfect Mandarin. I have a master’s degree in linguistics and I’ve been trying to learn Mandarin for 10 years, but I’m just awful at it. And language is just spectacularly complicated in terms of our capacity for explaining things. There are sentences that you utter, or that friends utter, that have never been uttered before in the history of the human language, and that will probably never be uttered again, and yet they’re perfectly understandable.

We can talk about language in terms of signals for communication, that is, the perception and production of speech and sign, or what you have to do to move the message from one place to another. We can also talk about language as structures for information, or what the rules are that govern how the basic building blocks of language go together to convey meaning – including rules for sounds, words, sentences, and discourse.

In psychology, some of the big questions about language have to do with language acquisition (both as babies and as adults); the brain bases of speech and language; and communication and language disorders, such as aphasia and dyslexia. Language is a huge topic, but we’ll hit some of the highlights here.

Demonstration

Phonology is the structure of the sounds that make up the words of a language. Phonemes are the building blocks of speech sounds. Phonemes aren’t large enough units of language to convey meaning all by themselves, but they do distinguish one word from another. For example, bit and hit differ by one phoneme. English has about 45 phonemes altogether.

But think about two things. One, there’s a lot of sounds that we can make (whistles, coughs, snorts, etc.) that aren’t linguistic. Two, there’s incredible variety in how the people around us pronounce the “same” sound. Think about people speaking with different accents, or how you sound when you have a cold. How does the brain handle this?

Listen to Tyler describe and demonstrate the phenomenon of categorical perception: (Includes recorded demonstrations of “bad/bat” and “slash/splash” courtesy of UCLA Phonetics Lab, used with permission. The original recordings, and many others like them, are available at Peter Ladefoged’s website Vowels and Consonants.)

Demonstration

However, we don’t rely on our ears alone to determine what we’re hearing. The McGurk effect is a famous example of how visual cues impact our perception of speech sounds. For this demonstration, you will play a single, five-second video clip three times, with different instructions each time.

First, play the video with your eyes closed. Make note of what the man is saying.

(PG Comment: This is a very short video. On PG’s computer, at the close of this video, YouTube starts another that doesn’t seem to be related.)

Second, play the video again with your eyes open. Now what is he saying?

Third, mute the sound on the video and just watch his mouth move. What does it look like he’s saying?

What do you think is happening in this situation? Why?

. . . .

Demonstration

Consider the following joke:

A woman is taking a shower when her doorbell rings. She yells, “Who’s there?” and a man answers, “Blind man.” Being a charitable person, she runs out of the shower naked and opens the door. The man says, “Where should I put these blinds, lady?”

The use of the word ‘blind’ in this joke relies upon the particularities of English semantics and syntax. Semantics refers to the meaning of a word or a sentence; syntax refers to the rules for combining words into sentences. The word ‘blind’ has several meanings (it can be an adjective or a noun), and the one that comes to mind first for most listeners is ‘visually impaired,’ so “blind man” is at first understood as adjective + noun. However, the rules of English syntax allow us to interpret noun + noun phrases such as ‘ice cream man’ not as ‘a man made of ice cream’ but ‘a man who sells ice cream.’ It’s not until the punchline is delivered that you realize that it was a different meaning of ‘blind’ all along.

Link to the rest at MIT Open Courseware

Fairness: the hidden currency of the workplace

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Not exactly about writing, but possibly a good writing prompt. And a very effective use of video.

From The Economist:

Some videos are almost certain to go viral: wild animals that pilfer food from unsuspecting families, cars that career through the windows of crowded cafés, pilots trying to land planes in high winds. Some are less obvious candidates to ricochet around the internet. Take, for example, the case of Brittany Pietsch, whose recording of a call in which she is laid off from a tech firm called Cloudflare went viral last month.

The recording lasts nine minutes, shows no one save Ms Pietsch and involves words like “performance-improvement plan”. Despite these unpromising ingredients, it makes public a moment of human drama that could occur to almost any employee. It also tugs at a fundamental human instinct. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Ms Pietsch’s dismissal, the manner in which she was fired, in a summary call with two people she had never met before and for reasons that are never properly explained, seems unfair. And few things matter more to people than fairness.

In experiments where one person decides how to allocate a pot of money with another, recipients will routinely reject an offer if they feel they are being given too little, even if that means neither party gets any cash. A fair share matters more than free money. Equity matters in non-financial life, too. A study conducted in 2012 by Nicholas Wright of University College London deliberately made some participants thirsty by hooking them up to a saline drip; they would still reject offers of water from fellow participants if they felt they were being offered too little.

Given how much weight humans place on fairness, it makes sense that managers should think about it, too. For questions of fairness arise almost everywhere in the workplace—not just when people lose their jobs but also in who gets hired, who gets the credit when things go well and who has that really nice desk right by the window.

Fairness is not just a preoccupation of workers. Last month a judge in Delaware ruled against Elon Musk’s eye-watering compensation package at Tesla on the ground that it was unfair to shareholders. A recent study into ceo compensation by Alex Edmans of London Business School and his co-authors found that bosses care about fairness, too. Money is not just about what it can buy; ceos think it is only right to be rewarded for better performance, and to be paid in line with their peers. A sense of fairness can be responsible for driving up bosses’ pay and fuelling anger about it at the same time.

Customers value fairness, too, not least when it comes to pricing. Consumers instinctively recoil at the idea of prices rising in response to surging demand, whether for Uber fares on a busy night, face masks in a pandemic or snow shovels the night after a big storm. Such views are deeply ingrained. A recent paper by Casey Klofstad and Joseph Uscinski of the University of Miami asked Floridians for their views of anti-price-gouging legislation that would prevent shops from raising prices after a hurricane. Even when told that economists and other experts believe that mandatory price ceilings would exacerbate shortages and lead to store closures, respondents supported the law. (Depending on your point of view, this either proves that the public is irrational or that economists are not human.)

. . . .

This combination of salience and subjectivity makes fairness a tricky area for managers to navigate, but not an impossible one. No hiring decision will feel fair if qualified employees do not even know that there is a job going; a survey of 3,000 jobseekers by Gartner, a research firm, in 2021 found that half of them were not aware of internal career opportunities. No lay-off will feel fair if it is too impersonal.

Link to the rest at The Economist

https://www.tiktok.com/@alexyardigans/video/7322931907887484206?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7325688532458309150

Not Dead Yet

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PG hasn’t yet entirely recovered from his sore throat caused by a virus/bacteria/evil spellcaster, etc., but he’ll post a few items today.

The Wexford Carol

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“The Wexford Carol” originated in Enniscorthy, County Wexford (hence the name). It dates back to the 12th century and tells the story of the nativity of Jesus. It is one of the oldest known Christmas carols. For centuries this song would only be sung by men but since 1990 it has been recorded by many female artists, including Loreena McKennit and Celtic Woman.

The Christians Awake Salute the Happy Morn

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The Christians Awake Salute the Happy Morn carol was written by John Byron who was born in Broughton, England in 1692 and died in Manchester in 1763. The Carol lyrics of Christians awake salute the happy morn are famous for the comprehensive quotation of the Archangel Gabriel “Behold, I bring good tidings…” John Byron wrote this poem in 1745 for his little daughter Dorothy.

On Christmas morning she found the manuscript amongst her presents , the title was originally called ‘Christmas Day for Dolly’ but was renamed as Christians awake salute the happy morn when music was added. The music to Christians awake was composed by J.Wainwright

Christians, awake, salute the happy morn
Whereon the Saviour of the world was born
Rise to adore the mystery of love
Which hosts of angels chanted from above
With them the joyful tidings first begun
Of God incarnate and the Virgin’s Son

Then to the watchful shepherds it was told
Who heard the angelic herald’s voice: “Behold,
I bring good tidings of a Saviour’s birth
To you and all the nations upon earth
This day hath God fulfilled His promised word;
This day is born a Saviour, Christ the Lord.”

He spake, and straightaway the celestial choir
In hymns of joy, unknown before, conspire
The praises of redeeming love they sang
And heaven’s whole orb with alleluias rang
God’s highest glory was their anthem still
Peace upon earth and unto men goodwill

To Bethlehem straight the shepherds ran
To see the wonder God had wrought for man
And found, with Joseph and the blessed Maid
Her Son, the Saviour, in a manger laid
Amazed, the wondrous story they proclaim
The earliest heralds of the Saviour’s name

Let us, like these good shepherds, them employ
Our grateful voices to proclaim the joy
Trace we the Babe, who hath retrieved our loss
From His poor manger to His bitter cross
Treading His steps, assisted by His grace
Till man’s first heavenly state again takes place

Then may we hope, the angelic thrones among
To sing, redeemed, a glad triumphal song
He that was born upon this joyful day
Around us all His glory shall display
Saved by His love, incessant we shall sing
Of angels and of angel-men the King

How TikTok’s BookTok craze is ‘making reading cool again’

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From Big Issue:

Welcome to BookTok. TikTok’s book recommendations, reviews and releases have amassed 185 billion views, making it one of the platform’s most active communities. According to the Publisher’s Association, 59% of 16- 25-year-olds have rekindled their love for reading thanks to the trend.

This is true for BookToker Nicole Murphy, who has 42,000 followers on the app.

“I stopped reading as I got older. But when I stumbled upon BookTok, it seemed like a positive space and I started reading more. I wasn’t part of a specific community and thought it’d be nice to be part of,” she tells The Big Issue.

“It’s made reading cool again,” Murphy continues. Addressing BookTok’s reputation for competitiveness she says, “Someone might say ‘I’ve read 30 books this month’, but they haven’t said ‘I’m better than you because of that’. It’s internal pressure people get from seeing this, like with anything online.”

There are hundreds of articles dismissing the platform for the competitiveness it allegedly fuels by promoting unattainable reading quotas and goals. GQ complains BookTok is “shallow” and has made being a reader more important than actually reading. Dazed speculates it has “sucked the joy out of reading”.

Signs are there. Some videos suggest “listening to audiobooks at 1.5x speed and skimming long passages of text”, while others show TBR piles (stacks of books that have yet To Be Read) taller than most people’s whole collections. But Murphy is quick to defend BookTok against criticism: “I urge people to spend more time on BookTok and look for what they’re genuinely interested in, not what they want to bash.”

. . . .

Another unexpected benefit of this renewed enthusiasm for reading is that it’s providing a boost for bookshops.

“So many books become bestsellers after going viral,” say Leah Caffrey and Alice Treadwell, from House of Books & Friends, an independent bookstore in Manchester. “You can see when certain backlist titles are having a moment online and many trending books have stayed consistent in our weekly sales; sales which were certainly boosted by TikTok for some titles.

“BookTok has encouraged younger generations to read more and find an online community to share their enthusiasm with. This can only be a good thing. It is creating generations of future readers.”

Link to the rest at Big Issue

PG picked a BookTok video at random. The following video had more than 17,000 views when PG embedded it.

@booktokbenny

#Inverted #booktokbenny #bookhaul #bookbuying #icebreaker #icebreakerhannahgrace #sjm #tessabailey #ihaveaproblem

♬ original sound – Booktok Benny | Booktoker

White Line Fever

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PG’s postings have been thin of late.

The principal reason is that he has been traveling with Mrs. PG and spending time with a variety of exceptionally cute offspring.

A bit earlier today, he and Mrs. PG returned to Casa PG and found nothing broken or missing.

Suffice to say, a motel and a laptop are not PG’s preferred surroundings and tools for posting riveting items on TPV.

During his recent travels, he has seen a significant number of truck drivers so these hard-working men (and a few women) have been on PG’s mind.

Not lots of lawyers, professors or college graduates in this group, but if they put in enough hours and miles into their job, they can earn a good blue-collar income. The price is a lot of isolation and loneliness for many of them, however, including many weeks away from family and friends.

Friends in Low Places

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Continuing PG’s literary overview of American Country-Western music, we come to another class conflict. The CW protagonist is always speaking from the perspective of the lower class even when he/she can afford a flashy and expensive pick-up truck. One of the CW sub-genres is called Outlaw Country, demonstrating the willing estrangement of some members of this class from the establishment which spurns and rejects them and their country ways in return.

I’ve got Friends in Low Places, dramatizes some of the the distinctions between the upper class (including the upper-middle class and pretenders that status) and its lifestyle and the working class. The title is wordplay, another common feature found in CW music.

Blame it all on my roots
I showed up in boots
And ruined your black tie affair
The last one to know
The last one to show
I was the last one
You thought you’d see there