I have now published two children’s books, but truth be told, when I set out to become a published author, I did not have children’s books in mind.

I wanted to write a novel. The problem is, novels are just… so long, to put it short. And I have trouble focusing on things, often things I even really want to do, if it is a demand that either someone has placed on me, or that I have placed on myself. On the other hand, the only way I can get anything done is if I feel that I am doing it for someone else. ADHD causes some very strange paradoxes. I can’t do it if you ask me to, but also I can only do it if you ask me to. And no, I don’t understand it, either.

So I have a lack of ability to focus for long lengths of time on demand, I have demand avoidance, and then on top of that, and also because of ADHD, I have a lack of experience with rough drafts. In fact, often, my finished product is the same one I started out with, but without typos and glaring grammatical mistakes. For example, the first book that I wrote– that was done in a single draft. No edits. I sat down and wrote it in the span of just a couple of hours and then a week later, I sent it off to be illustrated.

And that’s not me gloating, that’s just the way the ADHD brain works. We tend to mull things over in our brains extensively because we’ve always got 50 mental browser tabs open. That’s what we’re doing with them. We’re not necessarily being distracted by the next shiny thing that catches our eye, although that does happen (a lot less often than media would lead you to believe, however) we get distracted by thinking. You see me “zoned out,” but what I’m actually doing is composing. Not music, so much… although sometimes music, too… but words. Stories. I think about what I’m writing periodically through the day. I obsess over it. So when I sit down to write, I’ve often got exactly what I want to say already formulated and ready to go.

I remember in school a few times where teachers required a copy of my rough draft, so I’d write the thing, and then I would write a slightly more unsightly version of the thing so that I could get credit for writing a rough draft, even though I hadn’t.

And it works fairly well for me with short stories, school essays, and apparently even children’s picture books.

But it doesn’t work with novels.

Because they are just too long. I need a rough draft. Or at least something written down before I go to do the actual story writing. Otherwise, I lose the plot, can’t make it past the third chapter, and just get really discouraged.

I have tried several methods to find a way to resolve this issue. One of the things that seems to work well for me is to write non-linearly. Meaning that I write sections of the story separately, and I fit them together afterward. That’s one of the things I really love about the software I use (yWriter), as I don’t have to write in order, I can write in any order, and the program will keep it in order for me. That has really helped.

The biggest problem there has been trying to figure out how to transition and how to make things fit together. It certainly is easier to write linearly, so you do transitions as you go along, and then you don’t have to figure it out as an afterthought. And I’m sure the reader appreciates that, too. Unfortunately, I’m not a linear thinker, so I have a hard time with that.

This year for NaNoWriMo, I am trying a sort of combination of linear/non-linear writing, where I write from beginning to end, writing in as much detail as I can where the plot is most clear to me and summarizing or writing what I’d like to see happen in places where I am not really sure. So far it seems to be working, but I am still less than halfway into this year’s submission, in part due to time constraints and in part just due to my own difficulties with task initiation and follow-through.

But I’m still plugging away at it, and plan to continue even after November is over.