You know the thing about ADHD writers? We always go for 300% when 70% would be enough. And that would be fine, if the 300% version ever got finished, and got finished on time!
Instead, we end up endlessly throwing out our drafts and starting over, or feeling so embarassed by the quality of our work that we never feel ready to either go back to it or share it to get an outsider’s view. We get trapped within our work, stuck in our fear and insecurities. And that can have a real impact on our self-esteem!
But what if I told you that the problem actually isn’t you? The truth is that you’re trying to do too many jobs at once, because no one told you how to write with ADHD.Â
ADHD writing is... Doing too many jobs at once
As you might know, an ADHD brain tends to get overwhelmed. It’s like when you’re trying to run too many programs on an old computer: you run out of bandwidth and the screen freezes.
When writing, this usually happens because of all the things you’re trying to pay attention to simultaneously:
- Getting the new ideas on paper
- Old ideas you may have had weeks, months or years ago, that need to be incorporated
- What you wrote just before, so you can keep building on that
- What you’re about to write, so you can move in that direction
- The bigger theme or argument of your text
- The sources and pieces of information you want to bring in
- Being grammatically correct
- Making it sound good…Â
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Are you overwhelmed yet? I certainly am, just looking at this list! Â
Instant writer’s block!
But I have a radical thought for you. What if you didn’t have to keep all this in your head? I’ve seen in my work as an ADHD writing coach how powerful it can be to just take care of these things one at a time. This way, you can ease the overwhelm, reduce the perfectionism, and make you feel a lot more confident in your abilities.Â
And first, let’s separate the writing part from the editing.Â
Enter: the "shitty first draft"
And that’s where the ‘shitty first draft’ comes in. Or, if you like, the zero-draft, or the vomit draft (where you just vomit words onto the page).Â
It is absolutely possible to write a version of your text that contains the backbones of the story or argument, but not much else. A version that has grammar and spelling issues, that doesn’t “flow” right, and that doesn’t yet have all the references and nuances you want to see.Â
However, as an ADHDer, this is a skill you were never taught.Â
You see, many of us in school, got in the habit of writing everything at the last minute. As a consequence, our first draft was always the last draft: everything we wrote would be sent to our teachers, because there was no time between finishing the draft and submitting it to do any revisions.Â
And that is a belief that we have internalized and that our perfectionism makes us hold on to as though it’s our comfort blanket: Every word you write has to be right.Â
It’s time, however, to reprogram (there I am again, with the computer analogies!) your brain. Because by embracing the concept of a shitty first draft, you can actually perform miracles.Â
This is how it works in real life
I’m sure your inner critic is screaming at you right now, supported by your inner perfectionist. But I’ve been an ADHD writing coach for five years and I’ve seen the success of the “shitty first draft” time and again.Â
Take Panya, for example (no, that’s not her real name). She was stuck for months, unable to write her dissertation because she felt everything had to be perfect. After fighting her inner critic for such a long time, she really struggled to let go of the internal belief that kept her from writing new sentences. But during one of our sessions, a penny dropped.Â
The week after, she started writing “the story” of her chapter, without worrying about spelling, about grammar, flow, perfect sentences… She even left out references and quotes for this “zero draft.” All she did was vomit words onto the page to make sure all the pieces she needed were on there. By seeing her word count grow, she also started to build her confidence back up, which made it easier for her to deal with her inner critic and perfectionst in other areas of her life as well!Â
What if she hadn’t?
If Panya hadn’t embraced the concept of a first draft, she might have ended up like my other client, Christian (coincidentally, also not his real name).
When he first found me, he had been working on his PhD for seven years and was told he really needed to finish it that year. However, he had a problem. For four years, he had been trying to write his chapters. But every time he looked at his own work, Christian decided that it wasn’t good enough. So he would create a new document and start over. He now had thousands of pages of writing, and no idea how to wade through this to get his dissertation done within the 5 months he was given.Â
When we finally started working together, it wasn’t long before he realized that his main problem was: he’d never learned how to edit his own work. We managed to get him through the finish line before his deadline, and he’s now a professor who’s editing his own dissertation chapters to turn them into journal articles!
But this isn’t just a problem for ADHD academics! Giovanna (you guessed it, not her real name) was a novelist I worked with who had had the same problem for years: she’d look at her work, wouldn’t like it, and then decided to open yet another craft book to find a different system for structuring her book. She kept throwing out her drafts and starting over.
However, when I helped her edit a chapter during a coaching session, it turned out that the problem was never that she was a bad writer; it was that she was judging her first draft by final draft standards.Â
Final points on the shitty first draft
If you get stuck in the rewriting loop, feeling that “everything needs to be right,” you certainly aren’t alone. But I hope that in this post I’ve convinced you that you are absolutely capable of writing a great text… If you change your process that is.Â
Make sure that you’re not doing too many things at once, to such an extent that even a super computer would not be able to run all those programs. Instead, focus on writing a “shitty first draft” to just get the words and some of the ideas on the page.Â
Now that you are working on handling your ADHD, you no longer have to do everything at the last minute. And that means that you actually have time to improve things later! Start building up that confidence again by using theÂ
“shitty first draft” concept, and before you know it, you’re the amazing writer I know you can be.Â
And if you want to learn more about letting go of perfectionism as well as how to edit with ADHD without triggering your rejection sensitivity: make sure to check out the online summit I’m organizing!Â
At Basecamp to Brilliance, you’ll be able to connect with ADHD writers just like you, and learn from experts how to thrive regardless.Â
Click here to see the summit schedule!
Talk to you soon!
– Susanne
