ADHD Author

I don't know if this happens to a lot of people, or happens frequently, but I had the oddest experience today.

I was working on my new book (something funny, but with a different topic from my last work which no one seems interested in, which is fine) when I all of the sudden had a mental image of a completely different idea and it captured me with such ferocity that I immediately had to open a new file and start in on it. It was as if my writing had suddenly become dangerously ADHD. It was the weirdest experience, and a new one for me.

Probably a great poet.

I've noticed lately that the more I write, the more ideas seem to arrive. It's quite different from how I was when I was younger. I remember wanting to be a writer as a teenager. I also went through a phase where I was a poet. I won some awards and things, but obviously you can't make a career out of poetry, or so I was informed at the time.

Regardless, I seriously believed I was going to be a writer, as a life path, job, what have you. That persisted through college, where I met with several other people. I thought of them as less than intelligent. They boasted, they too were going to be writers! Some had already been published. That pretty much soured the whole thing.

I really thought that you had to be brilliant, technically astute, a wordsmith, really have something worth saying or reading to become "an author". Suddenly faced with people who I did not want to listen to in conversation, let alone read anything they might write, I decided that if that was what it meant to be "a writer" then it was not for me.

The main argument was that I felt I didn't have enough skill, talent or drive. I just wasn't good enough. I didn't think most people who wanted to be "writers" did either. Most importantly, I didn't want to bore people and I didn't think I had anything that really justified anyone's attention. I apparently still don't.

I never really invested myself in writing because I thought you couldn't make money at it. I grew up thinking that the most important thing in life was income. I sadly wasn't wrong. But now I make time to write, tweets, journals, this blog, my books. I may not have anything that other people want to read, and that's alright.

I write selfishly now. I write because it feels good. I write because I have these ideas and it seems like an injustice to myself not to put them down for posterity.

It seems incongruous, but the more I write, the more I have to write about. All of that time wasted as a teen and even into my early twenties, thinking that I should not bother writing things down until I had that "one big idea", that "bestseller" material. I am just now starting to realize that all of the things I did bother to write down were practice. I may never get to the gold-plated-top-dollar idea that makes me rich or famous. Now I know if I don't write things down in the interim, I will never get there.

Every day that we write brings us closer to our best work.

(I feel like that last part should be a graphic. Maybe I'll ask that nice person to make another one!)