Writing With ADHD: 5 Strategies That Actually Work (Medication or Not)

I am a person who has ADHD. This is an indisputable fact. A psychologist diagnosed me and a psychiatrist sends my medication for it to the pharmacy every 30 days. People who have just met me will sometime notice, it’s so obvious, and will say, “Do you think you might have ADHD?” Friend, I am the most ADHD-having person you will meet this week.

Medication is great. I support taking medication if it’s indicated for anybody who has ADHD. However: I don’t take my ADHD medication every day. I take it on most workdays, but not on light workdays or weekends. This is because my medication is a stimulant and (1) I don’t want the effectiveness to wear off over time and (2) I like to take naps on weekends.

So anyway I do a lot of my writing without the assistance of my medication. Also: I was not diagnosed until I was an adult in my thirties, so I spent a good three fourths of my life thus far getting by without medication for ADHD.

All this is to say I have picked up a lot of strategies for coping with ADHD without the help of medication. I have all kinds of tips and tricks up my sleeve. I break them out several days each week so I can keep functioning even when I’m not on amphetamines.

Writing is really, really hard to do when you have ADHD. This is because writing is a self-directed activity that requires executive function and focus and because writing aspirations and plans can be completely derailed by procrastination. Problems with focus, executive function, task organization, motivation, self-direction, and procrastinating are all hallmarks of ADHD.

Medication isn’t an option for everyone. I have a diagnosis and great doctors and health insurance and I still can’t get my medication a lot of the time thanks to supply chain issues. Whatever the reason somebody has for not taking the magical focus pills, the reason is the reason.

The only thing you will need for these is an accountabilibuddy (any friend will do if they’ll hold you to task).

Create a Pressure Prompt

When someone identifies themself as “a procrastinator” I tell them what I myself was told by a kind mentor—I challenge them to turn around their thinking about themself and identify as a “pressure-prompted person” instead. For one thing, “pressure-prompted person” doesn’t have the negative connotations that “procrastinator” does. I mean, who doesn’t like to brag that they work well under pressure?

Folks with ADHD are often pressure-prompted people, which can be mistaken for procrastination. For those of us with ADHD, a task that is overwhelming (hard, scary, complex) or boring can feel literally impossible to do. It feels like nothing you do can make you start this task. Every other task will climb past it on your to-do list. It will never rise to the top of the to-do list—you’ll always promote something ahead of it.

Until someone with authority comes along and prompts you to do it with either a carrot (reward) or a stick (threat). Pressure prompts the person with ADHD to get tasks done; we often do them very efficiently and quickly once we get moving. It’s getting us moving that’s hard.

Fake, self-imposed deadlines will not work for smart people with ADHD. You can give yourself all the deadlines you want but if you’re only accountable to yourself those deadlines are infinitely flexible (and ignorable). What am I going to do? Fire myself for missing my own fake deadline? Yes, please fire me from this boring task, self. I don’t want to do it anyway.

Enter your accountabilibuddy. Find someone who agrees to work with you on your writing. This could be a friend or family member, a fellow writer who also needs accountability, or a even a writing coach. The plan: Tell them what you will have for them to review and when. Commit. Ask them to set aside time to review your stuff. I have found that myself and my fellow ADHD-havers are more than willing to put ourselves under insane pressure but also strive to protect others from the insane pressure we can create by delaying.

Use your ethicality and your compassion to your advantage. Create a pressure prompt by committing to someone else to accomplish some writing. Ask them to hold you accountable to following through.

Organize Your Plan

Task organization is another challenge for people with ADHD. It’s not unusual to find yourself with more ideas you want to work on than time to work on them. You might find yourself with copious notes about character and plot and no idea how to actually start the draft. You may ask yourself: How did I get here? ADHD. ADHD is how you got here.

Lists are an the ADHD-haver’s best friend. Too many ideas to figure out where to start? Great, make a list of all your ideas. (Put them in your idea bucket.) Once you have a list, you can put that list in some kind of priority order. What’s most exciting? What’s easiest? Give them lower numbers. Less exciting? More complex? Give them higher numbers. Once you have something at number one on your list, you have an action plan.

It’s helpful for me to keep a running list of writing and writing-related tasks I need to do. There’s always something that needs drafting, editing, submitting to a magazine, sending out to the beta readers, researching, plotting, outlining, and so on. You know how you made the idea list of all your ideas? Now make a task list of all your tasks. You can start with the tasks you know you’ll have to do for each project—for instance, if you want to outline, then draft, then edit every chapter and then cycle each chapter out to a beta reader, that’s four tasks for each chapter. It’s fine if your list looks like:

• Outline chapter 1

• Draft chapter 1

• Review chapter 1

• Chapter 1 out to beta

• Outline chapter 2

• Draft chapter 2

• Review chapter 2

• Chapter 2 out to beta

And so on. . . .

You don’t have to do the things from your list in order. It’s just helpful to have a list you can cross things off as you do them. Nothing motivates me quite like crossing something off a list.

Remember: The first item on your to-do list should always be “make to-do list” so you can cross something off right away.

Practice Fake Focus

People with ADHD have a hard time focusing on tasks, except when we’re hyperfocusing, which I’ll get to later. For now just understand that I understand that focusing is impossible.

You can fake it till you make it, like with confidence (that 100 percent works). The premise behind “fake it till you make it” is that when you fake it you actually do the thing. Then once you have actually done the thing you know from empirical evidence that you can do the thing. Here’s what it looks like to do this with focus.

First, understand what takes away from your focus. Is it your phone? Social media? Video games? Texting the group chat? Looking at Reddit? These are all the things that take away from my focus, personally. Your mileage may vary.

Second, set yourself an amount of focus time that is achievable. My tattoo artist says five minutes is the amount of time that someone can stand “anything.” When they are four hours into a big colorwork piece on me and I’m dying, they remind me: “Just do five more minutes, you can stand anything for five minutes.” Then after five minutes they’re like, “Look you just did five minutes. You can do five more minutes.” And then eventually we’re done and I didn’t die.

So let’s say five minutes.

Sit down in front of your writing task with a timer set for that amount of time: Five minutes. Be physically away from your distractions. For instance, leave your phone in another room. If your distractions are available on your laptop, don’t use your laptop. Use a notebook and pen. Set your timer for five minutes—the length of time for which a human can endure anything. Now write for five minutes. Or don’t! You can just sit there and look at your paper if you want. Don’t get up and grab your phone. Don’t navigate to Reddit. Don’t doodle on your paper. Write or don’t write, but don’t do anything else either.

It’s fine if you don’t write anything. When your five minutes are up, you’re free. Go look at Reddit while playing video games and texting the group chat. Take another five minutes of focus another time.

Here’s what will happen if you stick with it. You will eventually come to realize it’s more painful to sit and stare at your paper for five minutes than it is to just write for five minutes. Writing for five minutes makes the time go faster. You will learn to focus on writing for five minutes at a time. From there, it’s just a matter of extending the time. When five minutes is a piece of cake, try ten. Try fifteen.

Before you know it your tattoo or your short story will be finished and you’ll have something to feel good about.

I have two more tips that really get to the heart of living with ADHD. While the first three tips would work well for anyone, the last two rely on two aspects of ADHD that neurotypicals don’t tend to experience:

• Dopamine deprivation

• Hyperfixation/hyperfocus

First, people with ADHD are starved for dopamine. We have have less of it circulating in our brains, and have to go trawling for it whereas our neurotypical peers with normal dopamine levels can kick back and write away. Second, ADHD brings with it the gift of hyperfocus, which we can use to our advantage if we know how and when.

Devise a Dopamine Machine

My therapist calls video games dopamine machines. You put a coin in them—the coin is your attention—and they dispense dopamine. I asked my therapist why I can play a video game for six hours straight, forgetting to eat, drink, or even blink sometimes, but it feels like I can’t focus on the things I want to do—for instance, writing—if my life depends on it. The dopamine machine was her explanation of this.

Buckle up, this is about to get scientific.

Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and rewards. When you do something that feels good, your brain releases dopamine. Some things that feel good and release dopamine include:

• Eating a yummy donut.

• Finishing a quest in a video game.

• Snuggling a beloved pet.

• Taking a walk on a pleasant day.

When you receive dopamine, you want to do the thing more. Finishing up exercise releases dopamine, which motivates people to exercise so they can finish and get more dopamine. (This is what a “runner’s high” is.)

Video games feel almost predatory in the way they are designed to stimulate dopamine release in the brain and keep players focused on them and coming back for more. Video game addiction is real. It’s a dopamine addiction. Video games do this by overlapping tasks and quests so that before you finish one, another one has begun. You say to yourself: “I’m just going to finish this objective up to clear my quest log and then I’m done for the day.” But when you finish your objective and get your experience points and your gold coins and your dopamine hit, the quest log isn’t clear—something new is now underway. So you finish that one and get another rush of dopamine, and that propels you into yet another objective.

Developers design games this way deliberately to keep players engaged and invested in their game, purchasing DLC, purchasing downloadable add-ons like skins, and purchasing sequels and spinoffs. This is why I suggest you gamify your writing habit—to turn it into a dopamine machine for you that keeps you coming back to the keyboard.

How you do that is the question. Do you still have that trusty friend, family member, or writing coach handy? Your accountabilibuddy from earlier? They’re going to play a role in this.

Okay you know how I said fake, self-imposed deadlines don’t work for me because I know the deadline is fake and I will just ignore it? That’s also what happens when I try to implement any kind of reward system. If I’m like “Hey I can have a cookie every time I finish a chapter,” that will not work for me. Because I know I can just eat all of the cookies and not write anything and no one can stop me.

False: My live-in partner can stop me.

Come up with your reward structure, whatever it is that will get the dopamine flowing for you, and ask your accountabilibuddy to administer it. Give them the cookies and strict instructions to only give you a cookie if you demonstrate that you have written a chapter. Or whatever your reward system is.

1. Divide your writing into achievable chunks (one scene, one chapter, 500 words, whatever).

2. Receive reward for each completed chunk.

3. Get dopamine.

Before long, your brain will start to associate the completion of the writing chunk itself as the rewarding behavior and writing becomes a dopamine machine.

Harness Your Hyperfocus

Finally, let’s talk about the ADHD-haver’s superpower: Hyperfocus. According to Royce Flippin in “Hyperfocus: The ADHD Phenomenon of Hyper Fixation,” hyperfocus is “an intense fixation on an interest or activity for an extended period of time.” My experience of hyperfocus as a person with ADHD is that this is not something you can consciously direct. Your brain gets interested in something and that’s it. You’re off to the races. You have no say.

Like if you get hyperfixated on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies—sorry, but until you’ve found and watched all of them you won’t be able to think about anything else. A week later someone will find you watching old bodybuilding competitions on YouTube because Arnold is in them. A week after that you don’t remember who Arnold Schwarzenegger is because you’re thinking about something else now.

In my experience, a new idea comes with a burst of hyperfocus on that idea. If I get a new idea, it shoves all the old ideas to the side. I cannot keep working on whatever I was working on. Only the new idea will do. I could look at this as a glass-half-empty situation but why not flip it and see the glass as half full?

When I luck into hyperfocus on an idea or writing project, I don’t waste it. I could lie in bed unable to sleep because my brain won’t stop working on it, or I could get up and write it. I could try to ignore it in favor of whatever it was I was working on before—or I could let my brain have its preference and just write the new thing. The amount of progress I can make on a project while I’m hyperfocused on it is astounding. I can knock out a short story or a couple of serviceable chapters in a day. When the focus fades, I can get back to my regularly scheduled writing. The trick is to capture the energy of the hyperfocus while you have it and make the most of it.

If coming up with new ideas is a precursor to hyperfocus for you, like it is for me, then you can start to control this magical ability by putting yourself into ideation mode when you’re in a writing rut. Get generating ideas until one seizes you and then enjoy the hyperfixation on that cool new idea that follows. You’re welcome.

I want to add that I don’t think there’s anyone out there who can’t tell a story. I think everyone has a story to tell and everyone has a way to tell that story. Everyone has to find the way that’s going to work for them. If you have ADHD, it might be harder in some ways to tell your story than it is for someone who doesn’t have ADHD. But if you want to do it, you can.