On Writing: ADHD Author in Action

I have seventeen documents open. Twelve browser tabs. Four coffee cups in varying states of abandonment.

This is writing with ADHD.

People imagine writers with routines. Same desk, same time.

I sit down and write. Then stand up. Then lie on the floor. Then I forget I was writing and spend forty minutes researching medieval bread recipes because one character mentioned baking. Then I remember I was supposed to be working on a contemporary romance. The romance has a deadline. The fantasy has been sitting at sixty thousand words for eight months.

I’ll get back to it. Probably tomorrow. Or in six months when I wake up at three a.m. with sudden knowledge of how the plot resolves.

Ideas come and go like weather. You don’t control weather. Except with ADHD the umbrella is never where you left it. I’ll be driving when my brain generates forty-seven story concepts. Complete novels dropping into my consciousness. I pull over to type them. Voice memos of me whispering plot points in bathroom stalls.

My notes app has four hundred and sixty-two entries. I might write all of them. I might write none.

People ask what I’m working on. Immediate psychological damage. Which project? From which year?

The truth is I’m working on everything and nothing. Six novels, two essay collections, a screenplay that will never get produced. Also a poem, even though I don’t write poetry. I opened a document yesterday and there were four stanzas. No memory of writing them.

People emphasize consistency. Write every day, same time, they say. I don’t even brush my teeth the same time every day.

My writing happens in binges. I don’t write for three weeks. Then three days straight—forgetting meals, sleeping four hours total, emerging with thirty thousand new words.

This is when the dopamine cooperates. Words come faster than I can type. It feels like the only thing I was ever supposed to do.

Then it stops. Not gradually. One moment I’m four thousand words in. The next I can barely remember how sentences work.

The crash always comes. I’m left wondering if it was the last time and I should start looking into other careers—what if I move to Australia and become a surfer?

I used to think this made me a bad writer.

But I actually do finish things. Just not linearly. Not the way writing advice books say.

I finish things when my brain decides. Sometimes six months after I start. Sometimes four years later. The timeline doesn’t matter.

They get written. Usually.

The ADHD brain loves routines. Can’t maintain them past eleven days. I’ve tried every writing schedule. They work perfectly until they don’t.

I don’t choose projects through logic. I work on whatever my brain decides is interesting. I’ve abandoned projects at ninety percent completion. Abandoned them mid-sentence for fourteen months.

People who don’t have ADHD would simply focus on one project at a time.
What a nice imagination they have.

The guilt is constant. I should be further along. More like the writers with steady reliable output.

Except I can’t be. My brain doesn’t have the neurochemistry. I’ve spent years trying to write like a neurotypical person and failing.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the system just has to produce words eventually.
My system is chaos. But chaos produces fiction and essays and half-finished manuscripts.

I keep all the documents open. All seventeen. Because I never know which one my brain will care about tomorrow.

This is writing with ADHD. Not elegant. Not what anyone teaches in workshops.
I’m working on seventeen projects. Or six. Or one, depending when you ask.
And somehow, eventually, things get finished.

Usually.

Probably.

I should check if that medieval bread research applies to anything.

It probably doesn’t.

I’ll look anyway.

 

Paulina Jarantewicz is a polish engineering student and aspiring writer. Though English is her second language it has become her primary voice for creative expression.