Being an Author with ADHD
I'm sorry for the late update, but once you read Maren's personal reflection, I'm sure you'll see that this actually fits in perfectly with this week's guest essay :)
*I have only made gramatical and punctuation corrections to Maren's essay
Writing is reall hard. I have all of these ideas just circling around in my head and I just want them to be on paper. I want to read the story in my head and I don't want to write it.
For me, writing is a personal struggle - I have ADHD. Say writing is like emptying a swimming pool in your head onto paper. Most authors have a bucket to do the emptying; I have a teaspoon. I am usually unable to finish things; I usually write myself into a plot hole or get writer's block for an extended period of time.
It's taken me a while to discover my writing style. I've tried werewolf stuff, vampire stuff, realistic fiction, historical fiction...but none of them clicked. Sometimes, when I go back and read my stuff, it looks like someone who was getting payed by the word or getting payed by the line. There is no in between.
For a long time, I tried to base characters pretty tightly off of myself or people I knew. Which usually meant the story would die when the relationships would crumble. The love interests turned evil in my eyes when their real life counterparts and I had falling-outs. Now, my characters are based off of all the people in my life. Any character gets Izzy's creativity and Genesis's outgoingness and Jachin's wisdom, or the character gets some of my physical features and Ana's musical talent and Izzy's straight up awesomeness. These characters as so much stronger, and actually lead to closer relationships with my friends. If I get closer with, say, Jachin, it becomes easier to write about all of the characters with aspects of him in them. It's strange.
Basically, I have really good stories in my head, but I can't figure out how to make it not a crap story. I started writing "A Life Of Pearls and Gold" and everything kind of fell into place. Writing techniques that I've been practicing and some pretty strong characters, and that's where I am. Trying to get over my writer's block and the fact that I don't have a computer for the summer so I can finish "A Life Of Pearls and Gold" before I'm fifty.
