On organization and focus

I have ADHD.  This is not a surprise to anyone who's known me for more than five minutes.  Someone who has ADHD, who wants to do something (like writing for a living) that requires significant focus, self-discipline, organization, consistency, habit, and all the other things that ADHD makes extremely difficult, has to come up with creative, adaptive solutions to get around ADHD's brain chemical problems and attendant cognitive and behavior difficulties. 

I've had mixed success creating and using coping mechanisms throughout my life.  Consistency hasn't been a hallmark of anything I've ever done, and that in itself is a problem with ADHD - even if you create coping mechanisms, you're still struggling against a brain that can't figure out how to stick with the program.  That's the crux, right there - ADHD is a problem that the brain needs to solve, but the tools it needs to use to solve it are the very ones being hampered by the ADHD.  

With writing, my problem is that I'll get an enthusiastic burst of motivation, and then the minute I hit a brick wall, the lights go out, I get distracted, and I just stop.  Even when I'm motivated, it's very easy to go, "Oh, well I'll just check this news site," and then...it's time for bed.  It's a dual problem of focus and consistency.  I have found it close to impossible to stick with a particular coping mechanism, system, or workaround for any length of time, enough to allow me to finish anything.     

Another problem is keeping track of what draft is the most current.  My computer desktop tends to be a confusing morass of disorganized folders copied over from previous computers, multiple copies of the same document, multiple folders called "Documents," and no real system of organization at all.  I've been noodling around with cloud-based storage services to aid me in writing on the go, but I'm always confused about whether they've updated properly, and if not, where my most current draft is.  And it's not like I've stuck with one cloud system - I've got Ubuntu One cloud storage, Asus cloud storage, Google Docs...so I've made my cloud as confusing and disorganized as everything else in my life.  And because I'm confused, that confusion serves as a convenient excuse for my brain to go, "Ah well, look over there at that shiny thing!"  And I don't get any writing done. 

Over the past week and a half, I've hacked my way into an organizational system for writing that seems to be working.  Its beauty lies in its simplicity, but also in the fact that I'm using my own love of gadgets as a motivating factor. 

I recently bought an Asus Transformer tablet running Android.  It's a little 10-inch touchscreen device that comes with a separate keyboard dock that clamps into it and turns it into a little netbook.  I'm using it now to write this post.  A nice thing about the tablet, besides the fact that it's shiny and fun to use, is that it's also very compact and easy to carry with me. 

I also have a big 15-inch laptop that has been my primary writing device for a couple of years now.  It works perfectly for that, but it's extremely heavy and not fun to carry around with me. 

Thus, what I've started doing is this.  I get up every morning about an hour before I have to start getting ready for work.  After a little bit of dithering, I sit down at my laptop and punch out at least some writing.  I don't worry about word count.  I just make sure that I write something. 

When I've hit a wall, or when it's time to get ready for work, I stop, save my progress, and copy the current draft of the document onto a USB thumb drive.  The thumb drive goes directly into a small pocket of a black shoulder bag I carry with me, into which is also placed my Android tablet. 

On my lunch break at work, I pull out the thumb drive and the tablet, and copy the most current draft over to the tablet.  I use the tablet's native (skeletal but useable) word processing program to do some more writing, and then I save my progress and copy the current draft back onto the USB thumb drive.  When I get home, I copy the current draft from the thumb drive to my laptop, on which I have created a folder called "Current Docs," into which the most current draft is copied.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

It sounds like a simple and blindingly obvious system that anyone with half a brain could figure out, and I'm sure millions of people are already using a similar system.  But for someone with ADHD, coming up with a consistent system that a) is simple to keep consistently organized, b) requires the development of a regular routine, and c) is designed to allow a maximum of writing while providing a minimum of valid excuses for not writing - coming up with a system that has all three elements is a revelation.  No clouds, no confusion, and I always have three copies of my most current draft, so it's also a system that backs itself up.

If I want to write for a living, I need to figure out how to streamline all of my routines and habits so that I don't have the excuse of saying, "that's too confusing...ooh shiny."  It may be that I don't stick with this system for as long as I'd like to think I will, but I'm going to give it the old college try. 
    
Note: I'm writing this using Blogger's mobile Android app, so please beware of typos - I can't find the spell check on this. 

The benefits of regular writing

http://lifehacker.com/5855019/how-to-harness-the-mental-and-emotional-benefits-of-regular-writing

Today is the start of National Novel Writing Month, which I did two years ago and managed to hammer out the first draft of the novel I still haven't finished yet. I'm not doing NANO this year, because there's a huge chunk taken out of my November by a CRUISE TO THE CARIBBEAN (YEEEE!!!!) and I really do need to finish Shooter Vanished (and maybe the other two novels moldering on my hard drive) before I start a new project. Anyway, the above article has some good points about the mental benefits of writing regularly.

How to sell your reader on your story's idea

(Link in post title). Haven't had time to read through this article - more posting this here as a "note to self" kind of thing.

The Shooter Vanished

and the direction of the story vanished from my brain for quite a while as well. Recall that just recently I was discussing turning it into a screenplay as a way of trying to avoid some of the stuff I was having difficulty with. But trying to write in a form I have no experience with isn't the answer.

Turns out the answer was simply sitting down and figuring out the damn timeline. This is a story that is very dependent on a precise timeline in which events unfold in a particular order. So I figured out the timeline. I made myself a little worksheet and plotted it all out. I even printed some blank calendars and handwrote the key events on the blank calendars to have a way of visualizing things better.

Once I did that, the story really started to click for me again. That, and I realized the yWriter software I thought had been helping me had actually just been throwing unnecessary complicated fiddliness into the mixture, which gave me another excuse to procrastinate. So I took the story out of yWriter and started writing it in Word again, and that also helped. Once I was able to look at what I had written as a whole, I was able to cut and paste, reorder, rearrange, rewrite, and start to really put the puzzle pieces together. I did a ton of that today, and I feel really good about it.

Three Bikes and a Broomstick (which is what I was previously working on) hit a wall for me when I realized that my three main protagonists were all completely flat and featureless. The story is fun, but I need to flesh out my characters before I continue it.

So, current status:

Jeff Thurman in Universe 12: Stalled, until I figure out how the hell it ends.
Three Bikes and a Broomstick: Stalled, until I flesh out the main characters.
"Ark Ship" (my hard sci-fi short story): Stalled, just generally, until I do some major tweaking.
The Shooter Vanished: Progressing nicely now - hopefully for some time to come.

Of course, knowing me, I'll hit a wall on Shooter Vanished next week. If that happens, I'll turn my attention to cracking one of the other things I have stalled. That's kind of how I'm going to operate, it turns out - have several projects going at once, and work on one of them until I hit a wall, and then move on to another, lather, rinse, repeat, ???, profit.

Anyway. Onward and upward.

Show, don't tell

Show, don't tell, is one of the cardinal rules of good writing. I've known that for years, kind of in the back of my mind, but somehow I'd kind of forgotten what it meant until I was reminded of it by a friend at a writing group last week. Instead of, for example, saying, "He walked into the room and sat down," it's better to describe the guy and the room using as many descriptive words as possible. This rule will help me immensely when I'm doing Nano, which is all about writing as many words as possible as quickly as possible.

Here's what I'd like to know. I've just finished posting Ark Ship here. Clearly it's not a finished product; it needs work, hell it needs a new title, but what I'm afraid of is that for a majority of the story, I "told." I'm considering doing a total rewrite, because I think the concept of the story is sound, but the execution may be weak.

If you've read Ark Ship, please tell me if you think I'm "showing" or "telling" you the story, because clearly that's an area where I need improvement.

Or, if you think Ark Ship is a work of staggering genius as it is, then hey, I'd like to hear that as well.

kthxbai.

Welcome to the new Sinister.

The left-handed electric mice who run this blog have made a tactical decision to shift its focus from politics to writing. This decision was reached because:

1) The mice have neither the time nor the energy to attempt to follow and comment coherently on the increasingly bewildering political circus.

2) A good deal of pretty good fiction and poetry has lately been spewing forth from the sinister brain that controls the mice.

3) In November, the electric mice will be working quite a bit of overtime to write an entire novel in the span of 30 days. This particular experiment might kill most of the mice.

Several things to note. First, the archives will remain available and visible on the left sidebar. Secondly, the right sidebar has been removed, allowing the main text to take up the majority of the screen. Thirdly, the font has been changed from courier to arial/helvetica, which is, in my opinion, much easier to read.

This relaunch simply reflects a change in emphasis. While the primary purpose of this blog will be to showcase my fiction and poetry, I may still write about politics from time to time. However, my intent is for all posts to be interesting, engaging, and held to a higher standard of writing quality than is usually found in a purely political blog.

Now, this next bit is critical. This blog isn't just for me to show off my work and go "woo look at me I'm great." I want people to give me feedback on what I write. I want constructive criticism. I want you to tell me, "Hey, this idea here works, but you've done something kind of stupid over here." Most of all, I want you to tell me if you think something I've written is good enough to submit to someone who might publish it, and if not, what you think I need to do to get to that point. I want to grow as a writer, to work hard at it, to focus my energies on creating a unique voice that I can contribute to the greater literary world. I want to be one of the people that high school students get bored having to study - because that's how you know you've really made it.

In any event, enjoy the new format. In a little while, I'll be posting the first part of a science fiction story I've been working on.