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.
