#My therapist says I have unusually roundabout but ultimately helpful tactics for dealing with my ADHD

[gravedigest]

Gonna answer this over here, hope you don’t mind.

Oops it’s gonna be rambling I am so sorry

A lot of my writing winds up being freestyle, and getting something going takes four or five tries to stick the opener, like pulling the cord on an engine to get it to start. I have like three 2k word versions of how I wanted Doing Something to go, and one of them actually has Sanford in Hank’s place and Sanford’s more like a refrigerator than a runaway lawnmower. It wasn’t as fun to write, so I shucked it into the “neat concept, I’ll fuck with it later” bin.

Which is fine, I can have as many half-formed ideas as I want because I have the storage space for it.

From there I kinda write out little scene chunklets that I can rearrange or swap out with eachother, I’ll be thinking about the next scene I wanna do while I’m writing a different chunk, or thinking about an old chunk while writing a new one that I can slot in between that’ll make the overall story more coherent. So like, giving Doc a motive for specifically using Deimos to pilot Hank? I didn’t have one for a really fucking long time, then I was writing I think, like, Deimos’ meltdown and was like “Okay actually Deimos is going to be Doom. You can run Doom on anything.”

Then once I get my chunklets in a row I can go back over and add in more shit, and it makes it really easy to change details. Hank in the restaurant, how did he get to the restaurant? Fuck it. He was holed up in the tower this whole time and it was right next door. I’ll mention Deimos smells something burnt up in that other scene, weeeeee~

I kinda got this whole method from just writing vignettes? HNMT is a pretty obvious example of shoving a bunch of little scenes together to make something longer. I was using the research notes in that to kind of give hard stops so I didn’t need to stitch everything together as much. Because I’m lazy. And being lazy means you come up with fun ways to cut corners like that.

Tis how the first livestreaming video was invented. People didn’t wanna go stand up to see if the coffee was done, so they just hooked up a camera to a network and forced it to stream the video. I think I remember that right, take it with a shaker of salt, I ain’t remember shit good.

I highly recommend just doing a shitload of self indulgent vignettes though, just a bunch of scenes you want to read that don’t have to be connected to each other that you don’t have to do anything with. Eventually you might wind up connecting some of them together and extrapolating on a concept, and you can snowball from there.

Or just make a fun little oneshot, Workday is from a 30k document of what amounts to practicing each character individually in a bunch of scenarios, kind of just getting a feel of how I can have people interact and differentiate them from one another. It also just has a lot of stupid dialogue.

I fucking love writing dialogue. It’s really bad. But also neat when you can figure out how to give characters enough voice to where you don’t get confused about who’s saying what without having to say “he said, they said, x explained” yadda yadda. I use that thing as a reference for how I write each character to kind of gage consistency, and I’m not the best at it but I sure am getting better.

So, yeah. I get distracted really easily and this all sort of helps direct me being distracted into getting more work done than I would’ve if I had to follow a real outline, playing with legos instead of worrying about brick and mortar.

TLDR: Mostly freestyle, then editing in the plot beats that form naturally from that.

@ya-killin-me-smalls

#My therapist says I have unusually roundabout but ultimately helpful tactics for dealing with my ADHD #I have to sort of think outside of my head #Also for every chunklet I write I get 15 minutes of mindless social media scrolling #Or I’ll do a run of Vampire Survivors or something #Which lets my brain unwind from the stress of being coherent and I can swish around ideas for the next chunk #Also fixed my ask button I think