ADHD + the Writing Process: An Open Studio

Where hyperfocus, novelty-chasing, and executive dysfunction collide with the messy beauty of making art in real time.

About every three days or three weeks or so, I have this conversation with myself:

What am I doing?

Are all these little bits I’m writing just really distractions my ADHD brain is throwing up so I don’t have to work on the real things? The Big Thing™?

Like, what was I doing before I was posting little pieces on Substack? This was supposed to be a side thing to a real thing that never actually took off, and now this is The Thing but it’s not the Big Thing™.

So I berate myself for not paying attention. For getting easily distracted by shiny little stories. And for having the crippling compulsion to see them through before I can move on.

So. Laying out a map here. Just for giggles. Just for fun. Just to distract myself one more day from the bigger things.

Two lanes of writing.

The Big Thing™, which is actually one big thing and one not-as-big thing. One is a novel. The other is like a short story, but really three short stories that go together to form something we haven’t quite named yet. I mean, it has a title but I don’t know what species it is yet.

Then there are the bursts. These daily Substack pieces that demand attention right away. They want to escape my brain and they are not happy being locked away in an “ideas for later bin.” They want to see the light of day and bask in the glow of zero views on Substack. Whatever.

Write fast, write hard.

What the hell am I doing thinking of an idea while I’m brushing my teeth in the morning and then posting it before dinner? Or lunch. Or sometimes even coffee. Real writers don’t do that. And so. What I’m posting must be absolute slop. Why am I compelled to keep doing that?

Shouldn’t I keep them and prune them and spruce them up and send them out to some kind of magazine or publication or online literary thing?

But maybe the bursts aren’t really distractions. And maybe they aren’t slop. Maybe they are scraps, peelings, coffee grounds, in a creative compost. Over time, maybe the whole dang soil landscape of my brain will be so rich that the Great Southern Novel will sprout from it.

Maybe.

So instead of piling up the mini-harvest in a silo on my external hard drive—where they are bound to be lost, by the way—I keep them here on the Substack, where anyone who is interested can kind of watch me compost in real time. Brutal as that may be some days. Every day.

Art Gallery vs. Open Studio

So if this stuff is on Substack, and not in a literary magazine, and if I’m so enamored with my Pink Tree Atelier that I want you all to come over and hang out in it and have a couple of beers with me, maybe that’s the thing.

Substack is my open studio and you can come on in and watch me work, sip on your beer or coffee, peruse the pieces pinned to the wall, maybe come back and buy a print later. And I’ll just be over here at my work table—my Table of Becoming—doing my thing. Shaping, carving, smoothing, shaping, and carving some more. Or sometimes leaving them craggy and rough.

And maybe I can look at the fast-twitch pieces as practice? Because I mean—lort knows—I need practice. I don’t even really know what in the hell I’m doing. So. Practice is good, right?

Anyway. That’s the same old discussion I have with myself every so often. It boils down to me saying, who do you think you’re fooling, Grace? You’re no writer. Not for real.

And it ends with me saying, maybe I am? I don’t know. But I kind of like doing this so I’m gonna keep on.

Here’s my novelette length collection of three stories, which is not the collection referenced in this piece. But I hope you like it.

Opera Rose and Other Devotions: The Bluff

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