A couple of weeks ago I received a newsletter from a BNA (Big Name Author), you know the kind who sells courses for $497 (or more!) who promise to tell you all the secrets to being a successful author(TM). And usually those secrets come with a good, solid kick of blaming you for your lack of success in the publishing marketplace, as if there weren’t so many different factors over which authors have absolutely no control over. In her newsletter, she said “I’ll teach you how to work through things like ADHD or depression…..”.
WHOA!
Let’s stop the presses and give the hamsters who run the internet tubes a coffee break and unpack this, okay?
Let me be blunt and painfully clear: YOU CANNOT WORK THROUGH ADHD OR ANY OTHER MENTAL HEALTH CONDITION AND EXPECT IT TO MAGICALLY GO AWAY. Full stop. End of text.
But also, that’s leaving you hanging, so let’s continue to unpack this a bit. I’m going to focus on ADHD (and AuDHD) because those are conditions that I’m personally familiar with (along with anxiety, depression, and cPTSD, all of which pretty much go hand-in-hand). There are people who are making a lot of money teaching a lot of people how to be productive with ADHD and AuDHD (and Autism) because that’s what our capitalist society demands. Productivity from us (all of us, regardless of condition) at any cost. There’s a whole bunch of other things in there like what’s being taught in universities, debunked science (that’s being taught in universities), and the fact that no one has really, truly consulted neurodivergent adults about what works best for us before applying it to vulnerable children.
The Three Things That Impact Your “Productivity”
So first off, when I talk about productivity, I’m actually talking about writing. Getting words down in a document. For authors, there’s also everything else that goes into producing something for publication like editing, formatting, submitting to a publisher or getting it ready for independent publishing, marketing etc. I’m going to call all of that “writing”. I hate the word productivity to be honest. Because productivity is too often tied to our worth or value, and that’s just frankly wrong. You have value, I have value, we all have value regardless of whether we’re productive or not.
And that’s where the big lie, and the big grift, happens when a BNA says you can “work through” your ADHD or any other health condition.
What are the three things that impact your writing?
- How you think and feel about your work, including such things as your interest in the story and whether you think you’re any good.
- What you’ve internalized about your work, which would be whether you think others think you’re any good, anything you’ve internalized about the publishing world, the writing community, etc.
- Your creative nervous system.
Which one of these things do you have control over?
Mostly how you think and feel about your work. You can also unpack what you’ve internalized (for example that you MUST “write to market” or that certain genres sell more, etc.) In my case, to give one example, I believed that my erotic romance outsold what I really wanted to write which is equestrian and fantasy fiction. I decided to see if that was true, and I spent an afternoon doing a really deep dive into my Bookreport dashboard, which just aggregates my Amazon sales into easy to read charts and graphs that I can look through. I was able to sort by pen name, and holy crap y’all, I realized that looking at my numbers since about 2018, that really wasn’t the case. I changed my thinking about that, because that’s what i have control over–whether what I believe is true or not empirically.
Your Creative Nervous System
You have some control, but not entirely, and sometimes not even a lot, over your creative nervous system. I’m going to start doing monthly webinars on this topic, because honestly, it’s something I’m really passionate about, bringing together what I’ve learned and the trainings I’ve had on our regular nervous system regulation and applying it to creative pursuits.
But let’s just say that your creative nervous system is your nervous system that you’ve probably learned about in school (sympathetic and parasympathetic and vagus system) combined with your inspiration and how you feel about your work. Your inspiration is that spark, that whatever you attribute it to, that has you spinning up stories in your mind, that gets you excited about a character, a setting, a plot point, and pushes you to share it with the world.
If you aren’t regulating your creative nervous system, then you’re flat lining while you’re writing. And that’s not inspiring nor is it healthy.
This blog is long enough, and I could talk about it more and more, but really, you can’t just work through any health diagnosis broadening this beyond things that are commonly associated with mental health (as if our brains were in a jar and not connected to our bodies). Your health on all levels is going to affect your writing and no amount of pushing is going to make that better, easier, or more desirable. And it doesn’t matter who tells you that or what they’re selling to do so. They’re hoping you don’t realize how amazing, how complex, and how unique you are, and that nothing is a band-aid fix if it involves the intangible aspects of being human.