Tripping into writing with ADHD

Throw a stone into a pool of writing advice, and you're almost guaranteed to hit something that says "oh, just sit and write every day! It's that simple!" Or perhaps its cousin: "set a specific time during your week to write, that way you always have time!"

Yeah, ok. That all sounds well and good, but thanks to the wonderful superpower called ADHD, I am immune to routines, schedules, and habits. I can try, sure, but at some point I'll drop the routine and it'll be like the habit never existed in the first place. There's no "getting back on track" because there was never a track to begin with. Frankly, it's a little demoralizing.

So I stopped trying to build a habit. Instead, I started building conditions — an environment and a handful of small defaults that let me trip into writing instead of waiting around for motivation to show up. If that sounds like setting traps for myself, well, that's more or less what it is. I'm doing my best Looney Tunes impression. I am the Coyote, building elaborate contraptions to catch my Roadrunner brain and then running straight into the traps myself. The difference is I actually want to be caught.

Following the desire paths

Near the end of 2024, I finally hit a breakthrough on a story idea that had been bouncing around my head for over a decade. It gave me a sudden hyperfixation on writing it all out and actually finishing. Now, hyperfixations come and go — I know this, and frankly I fear it enough some projects never start. But writing a novel has been my dream since high school, and this story is one I want to tell. But was it doomed to get a fraction of the way through, then fall flat the instant things got difficult?

I am determined not to let that happen this time. So over the course of the hyperfixation, I started noting specific patterns and rhythms in how I actually wrote, not how I thought I should.

Ever heard of a "desire path"? It's the trail that forms in the grass where people actually walk, cutting across whatever route the planners laid down. It shows where people want to go. I started noticing my own desire paths around writing, and instead of fighting them, I paved them.

Designing the environment

The laptop I write on has a button on the hotbar that launches my Obsidian writing vault, and as long as Obsidian is running, the laptop won't auto-lock. Insecure, maybe, but if I get distracted by something going on around me, logging back in is a hurdle, and hurdles are where I lose momentum. That same launch button lives on all my computers, synced and ready, so any time the urge hits, my writing is right there.

Some people would say "don't put distractions in your environment, that'll slow you down." I say "go for it." I keep a bunch of small, quick-to-pick-up games on that writing laptop. Why? Because the urge to fidget when a scene gets rough is real, and I don't want to change contexts by swapping what I'm looking at. If I hit a wall, I can play a round of Balatro, fail utterly because I'm not great at it, and drop right back into the scene.

Sometimes home itself is the distraction and I need to write elsewhere. I've got two spots. Not a coffee shop, as fun as those are. No, I go to my local shopping mall or the university campus where I'm working on my master's. What do they have in common? Lots of random seating, and lots of room to walk. Any time I hit a wall or just need to move, I get up and start wandering. They say exercise is good for ADHD; I'm certainly not the poster child, but I know walking is a great time to ideate. After a while I get tired enough to sit still, or I land on an idea I want to write down, at which point seating is never far. I pop the laptop back open and keep going.

Designing the work itself

The desire paths don't just shape where I write; they shape what I write, too.

I never expected to be the kind of person who keeps to an outline, but it's become necessary as I've realized I absolutely cannot write fiction linearly. I need to jump around, follow a plot thread through cause and effect, and adjust things as I go. The outline is a general roadmap more of the connective tissue between isolated scenes. I revise it constantly to course correct for new ideas. Any time I hit a wall in one spot, I open the outline and ask what I'm in the mood for today.

The bad days

Sometimes, inevitably, the idea of writing is like pulling teeth. But there are ways I keep wandering back.

First, it's always on the table, with a low barrier to jumping in. Sometimes just opening the chapter I'm stuck on on my second monitor and letting myself be mad at it for a while in its vicinity is enough to show me what the problem is.

Second, if I can't write but want to, I do story-adjacent things. Making soundtrack playlists is great for this — you feel out the vibe of a scene without writing it. Sometimes that's enough to start outlining how it plays out, which spirals into a good line or two, which spirals into actually writing.

And third, sometimes I just… don't. There are days I hate the whole project, think it's trash, and want to do anything else. Typically this means my creative energy is low in general. That's when I do something completely different, something more logic based like a coding project. The writing will still be there in a day or two.

Paving the path

I don't have a writing habit, nor do I really have willpower. What I have is a pile of little traps I've learned to set right where my feet already want to go. I can't force myself to march down some planned route my brain was never going to take. Instead, Coyote contraptions wait at the end of each desire path. That makes this the first project that didn't fall flat the moment the initial excitement wore off.

It does irk me a little to hear that advice to "just write daily" repeated ad nauseum, but I've mostly made my peace with it at this point. It helps to have a pile of writing that continues to grow more than a year after starting, which is all I really wanted.