I always thought of myself as a writer who wings it. I rarely plotted a thing, unless it involved concocting dynamite in 1890s Boston or committing murder with an aconite-soaked silk chemise in 1880s London.
Now, as I slowly emerge from a gruelling five-year burnout — though my strategy of “faking it until I make it” muddies the waters here a bit — I’m uncovering a lot about my past writing techniques. If you can even call them that.
What kind of writer are you, if you’re neither a plotter nor a pantser?
You see, at the tender age of 49, I learned that I am autistic with a hefty dose of ADHD. I also had epilepsy for three decades, and synesthesia until burnout struck. To understand this mess, I’ve been deep-diving into research on autism, ADHD, and creativity for the past six months.
Here’s what I wanted to know: Why is it that all those super-duper schemes and workshops for writing, marketing, social-media-ing, and earning-money-fast don’t do shit for me?
Here’s what I knew since I was a kid: I need freedom for my creativity to run at full gallop. You build a fence somewhere, and my creative brain slithers to a halt.
Here’s what I tried during the first months of wriggling out of the vale of tears, er, burnout: Learn everything about how “real” writers write. I plotted using The Three Act Structure. I plotted using The Heroe’s Journey. I vomited a lot of text into those tiny boxes of where-goes-what-when, only to become bored stiff even before writing the first chapter.
But hold on a sec! Hadn’t I known for ages that my creativity craves space? So, why did I try to confine it to the “proper writer” mould? Sure, I managed to produce text again, but it felt like jamming my right foot into a left shoe. You can walk for a bit, but soon enough, you’re in agony.
The last thing I wanted was to stop writing for another five years. The thing is, I need writing. It helps me figure out a world that isn’t made for people like me.
But that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Figuring out WHY you do a thing. I can’t say the reason is that I love writing because, sometimes, I hate it.
But I most of the time, I love it. Ultimately, though, I write to think and to understand. Starting with a rigid plot framework doesn’t leave much room for that kind of exploration, does it?
So I dug deeper into the WHY, and then it struck me:
What truly drives my writing is the transformation of the protagonist. Their desires, the mistakes they make, and the people they love, hate, or tolerate along the way.
I can’t shoehorn that into Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution, or Call to Adventure, Initiation, and Return. Those frameworks focus on external motivations, detached from the essence of the person I’m writing about. I want to learn everything about the protagonist’s internal struggle and their emotional journey — their psychological motivations, transformations, backstory, and inner conflicts. That’s what drives my stories forward.
Not a relentless barrage of car chases, bank robberies, shootouts, and sex scenes.
So instead of writing “like a proper author,” I decided to embrace my little weirdo brain with all its quirks and stick to my way of storytelling. No need to keep telling myself I have to be more “normal,” whatever that may be.
Life is much more fun without hammering my round-shaped self into a square hole.
I’m pretty good at planning and making to-do lists. And I love problem-solving. But the one problem that keeps biting me in the backside almost every day is this:
As an AuDHDer, I have this insatiable drive to find new, exciting, sparkly things I can twist my mind around while at the same time, I need some measure of routine, or at least the illusion I have a tiny bit of control over my days.
What fucks with my routine is our farm (and the ADHD part of my funny little brain, if I were brutally honest). A few years back, I had this sparkly new idea to start a regenerative goat dairy farm on Gotland. So that’s precisely what we did.
But what screwed with that idea was Covid and Putin, roughly translating into a doubling of the mortgage, a tripling of feed costs, and an up to six-fold increase in electricity costs. Among a bevvy of other crap.
A tree falls on the electric fence and the goats start to eat our neighbour’s flower beds. A large cheese order wasn’t picked up or came in too late, so we end up making a delivery run. The young bucks jumped a fence and are now trying to woo the ladies. A goat broke her foreleg. There’s suddenly a hole in the roof of the hay loft. The chainsaw broke, then the wood splitter broke, and now we’re making firewood with a handsaw and axe. Keeps us warm, tho. The fucking wheelbarrow broke. Another tree fell on the fence and the goats are now out on the road. It goes on and on. Even the most brilliant planners and problem solvers won’t get through this mess without shaving a decade off their lifespan.
So if you’re a writer, creative, or entrepreneur with one or several other jobs and side-gigs, plus ADS and/or ADHD, you can probably understand that some, er, most days are extremely hard to plan, and you ask yourself:
Life just keeps getting in the fucking way so why did I even bother making this bloody to-do list in the morning, knowing perfectly well that at the end of the day, all I’ll manage to do is lay face down on the couch and weep, and feel like a complete loser because I failed to accomplish 99.9% of the stuff I thought I should accomplish that day.
Drumroll, please! Here’s my daily planner. It lists the ONE thing I absolutely need/want/have to get done on that particular day. And…oh, look! There’s even space for doodles:
I learned to leave enough space for crap to go sideways (because it will). But there’s usually ONE particular thing in each day that I have to or want to get done. Screw brushing teeth! Screw getting out of my PJs! But I always do that one thing, like finish writing this little post here, or killing one thousand words for my newest book, or fixing that bloody hole in the roof of the hayloft.
One step at a time.
As long as I have done that ONE thing, I’m okay.
Hey there, fellow neurodivergent wordsmiths! Are you staring at a blank page, wondering how to turn your idea-collection into a book? Well, buckle up, because we’re about to dive into the wild world of neurosparkly writing!
First up, let’s talk about mind mapping. It’s like giving your brain permission to play connect-the-dots with that chaos of ideas you have in your head. Start with your special interest in the middle and let your thoughts explode outwards like a firework of creativity. Don’t worry if it looks like a squirrel on LSD drew it.
Next, let’s get our “What if?” magic on. This is where we take our special interests and toss them into a blender of imagination. What if your obsession with vintage typewriters led to discovering a portal to 1920s Paris? What if your encyclopedic knowledge of artisan cheese varieties saved the world from an alien apocalypse? The weirder, the better! Permit your creativity to play!
Set a timer, grab your keyboard (or quill, if you’re feeling fancy), and just… write. No judgment, no backspacing, just pure, unadulterated brain-to-page action. It’s like letting your special interest take the wheel while your inner editor takes a nap. Who knows? You might end up with a bestseller… or at least a really entertaining grocery list.
Ah, the research rabbit hole — my natural habitat! Let yourself dive deep into your special interest. Read everything from scholarly articles to obscure forum posts. Before you know it, you’ll emerge with a head full of even more ideas and possibly a new conspiracy theory about the true origin of cheese strings.
Try combining two of your special interests. Love both quantum physics and knitting? Boom! You’ve just invented your version of the String theory. Or you got a story about a physicist who knits sweaters that bend space-time. Allow your brain to play mad scientist with your ideas!
Forget for a moment how annoyingly loud and smelly the world is to people like us. Use your heightened senses to your advantage. Describe how your special interest engages all senses. What does success smell like in the world of competitive sandcastle building? What’s the color of Pi? How does the perfect algorithm taste? Get weird with it and don’t stop there.
Create characters who share your special interest or are completely baffled by it. Imagine a world where everyone’s obsessed with your favorite thing — or where you’re the only one who gets it. The possibilities for conflict and comedy are endless!
Remember, there’s no “right” way to generate ideas. This post is just an incomplete, beautifully un-flawless collection of what popped into my brain, and has now (hopefully) infected yours.
Your brain is a unique, beautiful, chaotic masterpiece! Embrace the quirks, run with the obsessions, and let your special interests be the fuel for your creative fire. Who knows? Your next fixation might just be the key to unlocking a whole new world of storytelling.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go write about a middle-aged Swedish assassin who accidentally kidnaps a demon with the help of a cattle herd. Happy writing, you beautiful neurosparkly unicorns!
Dear neurodivergent writer,
you asked, I answer! Here’s my tried-and-true method to achieve burnout faster than you can say “writer’s block.” It worked like a charm for me.
1. Write a book and become an indie author.
2. Write a second book and quit your day job so you can finally be:
3. A full-time writer. Yay!
4. Learn everything (yes, everything) about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Amazon algorithms. Beat yourself up if your expertise isn’t top-notch.
5. Follow advice from all the self-proclaimed marketing gurus and become an expert in Facebook and Amazon ads. Master ad copy, custom audiences, keywords, blurbs, and covers. Beat yourself up if your expertise isn’t top-notch.
6. Naturally, don’t forget to become an expert in BookBub ads, too.
7. Learn everything about newsletter building and marketing. Beat yourself up if your expertise isn’t top-notch.
8. Write, edit, and publish a new book every three to six months. This is what pros call sustainable. Develop constant anxiety about your writing being offensive to some people, or the book sucking massively, or even just partially.
9. Attempt to become a cover design expert every time you publish a new book, despite failing the last five times. Beat yourself up about your amateur design skills. Sure, you never formally studied arts — but try harder
10. Develop constant anxiety about being a hack. One day, people will find out.
11. Do everything simultaneously.
12. Check your sales ten times a day so you can:
13. Recalculate your ROI daily, followed by panic attacks because you’re a full-time writer who needs to feed your family. What if today is the day everyone realises that your writing sucks? How many books will you sell tomorrow? Zilch.
14. Obsessively check your Amazon and Goodreads reviews to keep feeding your anxiety about writing sucky books and offending someone.
15. Agonize over all the reviews below 3 stars. They prove your writing sucks. Also: Some reviewers get the facts wrong, like ornithology and botany in the 1880s. You could explain it to them. It’s so hard not to explain the facts to people. But it’s not professional to reply to a review of your own book. So you have to agonize for weeks about the poor souls out there who don’t have the correct data.
16. Write a blog because clearly, you’re not doing enough.
17. Engage on every social media channel because YOU. ARE. NOT. DOING. ENOUGH.
18. And whatever you do, do not ask for help!
I started publishing my books back in 2012 when self-publishing was still kinda new-ish, and all the internet trolls had a party torching independent writers because we didn’t go through the holy gatekeepers of proper literature, aka “traditional publishers.” We dared to do our own thing while showing the holy gatekeepers our middle finger.
Oops, did I forget to mention that independent publishing is much older than Amazon? But that’s a story for another time.
My self-publishing journey went a lot better than expected. I’d hoped for 800€ per year (our vacation budget back then), but in my good years, I managed to make enough to support my family of four as the sole breadwinner.
Yep, I’m creating stuff professionally so I should do at least some marketing. I get that. But the mistake I made was carving out more and more time for social media ads, Amazon ads, and BookBub ads, learning about ads, optimising my existing ads, optimising my newsletters, trying to tame the ever-changing Amazon and Facebook algorithms… The list is endless. But a girl’s gotta eat, so…
There was a feeling of impending doom, 24/7. I felt like constantly being on the verge of failing my family if I didn’t hop on the newest trends in marketing and social media.
For a time, the stress paid off. I was 100% self-employed as an author, and we didn’t have to turn every penny.
By 2018 I spent 50% of my time selling my shit, 40% worrying about selling my shit, and only 10% writing my shit.
And that’s when I stopped writing. I had no voice left because I’d twisted myself into a version that could sell more books.
BUY MY SHIT! I’d learned to say in various eloquent and un-eloquent ways, while my little, burned-out writer soul kept whispering: It’s just a fucking book, dude!
And so for 5 years, I didn’t write a peep. It did funny things to my brain because to me, writing is thinking. Not writing felt like my ex-scientist brain managed only mumbled one-word sentences instead of concise narratives.
Although I’m finally back at hammering stories into my laptop, I’m still not completely out of my burnout hole, and I still have the feeling of insufficiency and impending doom because I’m not marketing the hell out of my shit on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, BookBub, and whatever else is trendy right now.
But I learned to crank up the volume of my little writer soul that keeps yelling at me: “It’s just a fucking book!” And I’m still learning to be kind to myself — at least once in a while — to protect and nurture my creative spark.
I realised that I’m happier writing for myself and a small group of readers who love my fictional characters. I don’t want to write for everyone. I don’t want to make algorithms happy, nor do I want to be a bestselling author.
Why did law enforcement and news reporters “forget” that girls and young women are sex trafficked from jails — a crime that has been going on for at least a hundred thirty years?
I asked myself that question when I stumbled over W.T. Stead’s article series in the Pall Mall Gazette while researching for my next Victorian vigilante thriller.
W.T Stead was an investigative journalist reporting on sex trafficking in Victorian Britain. He found that girls and young women are trafficked directly from prisons, and that law enforcement doesn’t care one bit.
They go into workhouses, to see what likely girls are to be had. They use servants’ registries. They haunt the doors of gaols when girls in for their first offence are turned adrift on the expiry of their sentences.
(…)
If a child of fourteen is cajoled or frightened, or overborne by anything short of direct force or the threat of immediate bodily harm, into however an unwilling acquiescence in an act the nature of which she most imperfectly apprehends, the law steps in to shield her violator. If permission is given, says “Stephen’s Digest of the Criminal Law,” the fact that it was obtained by fraud, or that the woman did not understand the nature of the act is immaterial.
The Pall Mall Gazette, 1885
They also mention that law enforcement shrugs it off.
Remember, we’re talking about vulnerable girls and women, most of them with a background of abuse, drug addiction, and poverty, and no place to go once they are released from jail. What would you do if you had nothing and no one you could ask for help, no money, no roof over your head, and then a pimp offers you a room, food, and drugs to forget your shitty life?
I struggled to understand why law enforcement isn’t interested in the fate of these girls and never has been. I tried not to file this under “No one gives a shit because they’ve already been labelled as prostitutes.”
So I dug a bit deeper and found this: NHI — No Human Involved, is an unofficial term used by law enforcement to describe murders of people in marginalised communities, including sex workers, sex trafficking victims, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour.
Looks like my initial assumption of “No one gives a shit because they’ve already been labelled as prostitutes” was correct. Now I just have to add “plus anyone who is not white and straight.”
