AuDHD and Creativity
Changing how I approach the things I love
Near the beginning of August I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. This wasn’t surprising to me or anyone close to me, and I’ve also suspected for some time that I’m on the spectrum. While I didn’t get an official autism diagnosis, I was told that I meet the clinical criteria for mild to moderate autism, which again, wasn’t surprising to me.
I really started trying to figure out how my AuDHD brain works about 6 months ago, and it has been incredibly illuminating to me, especially in how I approach my creativity.
I have tried pantsing and detailed outlining, mind mapping, all of these things, and pieces of a lot of them worked, but a lot of them didn’t. Sure, everyone knows you have to find your own method that works for you, but it was frustrating finding a laundry list of things that don’t work for me, and so few things that do.
I don’t have answers, but here are a few things that I do know:
I need structure. Without structure I get lost, frustrated, and won’t finish things. This is outlining, reading craft books, etc.
I need to stay interested. Things need to be fluid, exciting, interesting to me. This is figuring out how much I actually need to know ahead of time, and how to lay out my work ahead of me.
I need information ahead of time. Figuring things out as I go is not a strong suit of mine and that extends to my storytelling, and my process has been lacking in research.
I need references. This is a lot like number 3, except that instead of applying to specific research, this is reading within the genre. I already do this a lot, but it’s a big part of the process.
I’m sure that more will come up more in the future, but this is what I have figured out so far.
And outside of my AuDHD diagnosis, I’ve been learning things about how I prefer to work.
We’ll talk about that next time.