(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

REQUESTING ANSWERS FROM: autistic and/or ADHD artists, especially novelists and other writers of book-length projects

DISALLOWING ANSWERS FROM: neurotypicals

QUERY: How does one stay on task for enough months to complete a large project? A novel draft, for instance?

Comments

[telophase]

ADHD here. Externally-imposed deadlines. I can't set them myself, because I'll just blow through them, but if I manage to arrange things so that someone else is depending on me, or some such like that, then it's much easier.

Hyperfocus is good for short projects, but I can't keep it up for weeks or months.

[alexseanchai]

Noted, thank you :)

I don't think that'll work for me, because college assignment deadlines didn't work so hot for me? But also my ADHD was not diagnosed nor medicated when I was in college...?

[telophase]

Yeah, may be not. :) College deadlines worked for me, although what they meant was I knew which day I'd actually start the thing (the day before). Once I realized that research+writing for me took up 1 hour for every page (i.e. a 5-page paper would take me 5 hours), it got even worse because I could judge to the minute when I needed to crack open a book.

[alexseanchai]

XD omg wow

half convinced "learn study skills" is code for "don't be ADHD" tbh

[telophase]

Yup. One of the reasons I'm annoyed at my mom is that she didn't tell me her secret to college until near the last test of my last semester of grad school: she (we think is probably also ADHD, but never diagnosed) typed up all her notes after class. So I tried that for my last final and aced it, and then was hopping mad that I spent four years of undergrad and two years of grad school vainly attempting to study when I could have just typed my notes into the computer and learned them that way.

My second stint of grad school was library school, where we wrote papers and did projects instead of having formal tests, for the most part, so it didn't come up. But by then I was also experimenting with not taking notes at all in class, since I can't write and listen at the same time, and I think I got more retention of data from that. (Don't think that would work for a practical subject like language or math class, but for a more theoretical subject, sure.)