• they/it

I do art, sometimes


dcoles
@dcoles

When people talk about ADHD, it's typically about how it makes it difficult to maintain focus (or the flip-side, the tendency to hyperfocus on something).

For me, another notable aspect of ADHD is non-linear thought. Much like my tendency to jump between activities, my thoughts tend to also jump backwards and forwards and all over the place. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it tends to lead to some particularly creative insights and connections; but it also can make certain activities, in particular writing, Hell.

As an example, I really struggle with "stream of conscious" writing. My stream of conscious is more like a turbulent storm. So instead of starting at the top of the page and working downwards, I tend to write my documents from the inside out—inserting individual sentences into logical place as they arrive. As a consequence, documents tend to "evolve" over time and it's difficult to predict when they will be "done" (it also partially sucks for writing fluffy filler-text).

I've also noticed that it causes some odd grammatical quirks:

  • Word superposition: inability to decide which word is better/clearer
  • Nesting: a series of nested (typically using parenthesis (or sometimes brackets)) thoughts
  • Misordering: words grammatically end up in grammatically incorrect order
  • Punctuation soup: commas; semi-colons; brackets; em-dash—they're all good
  • Superfluous grammar: when a sentence has got some unnecessarily grammatical structures

Thankfully these can all be caught during proofreading. It just takes a bit longer.

Edit: It's fascinating how the difficulty shifts throughout the day. My focus is generally better in the evenings, which also tends to be when my writing is most fluid.


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in reply to @dcoles's post:

yep! I have an old notebook somewhere which has some iterations of a poem I was working on for about half a year and my god, actually writing out a full block of text and then editing/rewriting etc was really interesting in retrospect as a visual representation of just how much writing is restructured, rephrased and otherwise changed

Makes me kind of wish word editors had a recording feature, so that you could watch how a piece of writing developed over time. Throw in some semantic analysis (when sentences are split, reordered, merged, etc.) and it would make a really interesting way to watch how the piece of writing evolved.

I relate to this a lot, particularly the need for artificial structure when writing on paper and every one of the grammatical quirks. It's nice to see I'm not the only one struggling with this.

Glad it's not just me! I was talking with a colleague about writing documentation and was explaining how he would "waffle on and write too much"—I was like "... you mean you don't write in random order??!".

One interesting experiment I tried was to take a longer piece of my writing and throw it into ChatGPT; asking it to rewrite it so that it "flowed better". It was the strangest sensation to read my own thoughts, but smoothed into a linear-flowing piece of text.

My mom is an editor so I've had a professional resource for "tell me how to flow this better" my whole life. One big advantage of a human editor being the ability to explain why they're doing it (you could ask the language model the question but it wouldn't be answering it, it would be generating stochastic text that looks like an answer based only on words in its model not on meaning).

A friend has told me I’m better than average at cranking out a rough draft of fiction because when I get in a flow state on a story, 100k words in a month isn’t impossible… but my sentences tend to have so many comma splices in them ><

Editing my stuff can be ROUGH

I don't know what you're talking about (yes I do, (I really do))

Sometimes my brain gets stuck obsessing over word choice, between two words. Or that thing where you KNOW there's a perfect word for a concept but you just CAN NOT recall it. It's bad when I'm writing, but it's even more annoying when I'm talking and my conversation partner just has to stand there waiting while my brain stalls

I feel this a lot - especially in situations where there's a pressure to be concise without needing to respond quickly. You write some stuff, go back, add a clause to the middle of sentence, add a parenthetical, copy paste something to a new position, reword a part, until you end up with a very long message that feels difficult to read (therefore requiring more edits!), and so on. I didn't realize this was an ADHD thing but this has helped me connect some dots, ha. (ps. this message took longer to write than I'd care to admit and I'm not pleased with it but I'm going to hit submit anyways).

Holy shit, after struggling my whole life with basically all of these issues (not just when writing, but also in conversation - I speak rather haltingly at times because I have to pause while my brain tries to find the precise word to convey what I mean with the exact correct connotations, which means I get interrupted a lot because people think I'm done talking even though my thought is very clearly unfinished, and I go on rambling tangents in the middle of a thought (oh hey look what I'm doing right now while writing this) - seeing just how many other people think like I do when structuring their sentences, writing, etc. is insanely validating. Wow.

I remember as a kid, whenever I'd get to the essay sections of tests, particularly the standardized tests where they'd expect you to write a fucking narrative, my brain would basically just freeze, because having to write something that complex in linear order (while also being bad at writing outlines, a skill I think I've improved a bit at over the years but one where I'm still pretty sluggish, probably to the point where I'd still struggle with those standardized tests' essay sections) was utterly unnatural for me. I'd also struggle with getting any schoolwork where I had to write an essay in on-time (if I'd turn it in at all), which eventually led to me getting placed in a special-ed English class in the 5th grade... and then very quickly getting taken out once they realized the content being taught was far too basic for what I could handle (but of course they never gave me any fucking accommodations once they put me back into the class in which I'd otherwise have started the year, because as we all know, difficulty with comprehension is the only way in which someone could possibly struggle with schoolwork 🙃)

... Y'know, now I'm wondering if this is part of why I like antiquated grammatical orderings so much - like, nowadays you're generally expected to say "if there ever was [...]" unless you're trying to sound like you smell your own farts or whatever, but in my mind "if ever there was [...]" sounds not just as natural, but in fact even more natural of a sentence structure, particularly when the fingers or lips it's coming from are mine.

I had to read "if ever there was [...]" about three times before my brain even registered that it was in a different order. 🥲

But that's exactly how I would want to do it too. The natural syncopation of *tap-tap-pi-ty-tap* is far more interesting than the metronomeic "if there ever was [...]".

I always had trouble when school tests required me to write an essay within a certain amount of time. I was decent at it, but I always struggled with staying on time, because I kept re-writing entire passages. Can't remember what got the idea, but during my last year, I decided to spend 50% of my time not writing the essay, but writing down every single thought I had about a subject and ordering them into a structure. Never had any timing issues after that and my grades improved a ton.

Eighteen years later I find out that I have ADHD.

I still write essays this way. I use a notebook though, because for some reason I typing something into a word processor feels much more definitive than just putting it down on paper.

That's an awesome idea. I was always so worried about time limits, that I would jump straight to the writing part rather than "wasting time" planning things out. I suspect I would have struggled far less with the prose part if I'd just given myself time to get my thoughts in order first!

It is really difficult for me to choose what words to use in sentences when I am writing in general (here or on Discord) and especially when I write fiction. I like writing fiction, I want to do it more often, but I can only write short passages every day because it exhaust me.

I have all of those grammatical quirks but interestingly I usually write from start to finish super fast without really thinking about what I'm doing or where I'm going - I'm just transcribing my thoughts as they come to me. But then I go back and edit it, and that takes ages, as I add things in the middle, rearrange things, reword things, etc. I'm also better at not writing nested parentheticals in the first place now, because I make an effort not to write them because I know they're hard to follow, because people can't hold like 5 incomplete sentences in their heads at the same time, you know?

I usually read through what I've written at least three times in full, if not more, making changes each time, until I'm either finally satisfied, or notice it has been several hours and I should really call it good whether I'm satisfied or not.

That's an interesting (and totally valid) way of approaching it that I hadn't thought of before. And really, the important bit is just getting the thoughts down on paper before they evaporates into the ether, right?

The number of great ideas lost for lack of a piece of paper. 🥲

What's interesting to me is that almost everything you describe here is potentially a valid stylistic choice, depending on the context. Like, there are writers whose whole thing is intricately nested parentheticals.

Yep, this is all too relatable for me, especially when I write long passages online.

Normally I only go back and edit superposition, misordering, and superfluous grammar. Nesting and punctuation soup are wonderful constructs that I like having in my writing, thank you very much.