LITERARY CHORE CHARTS MF'R, DO YOU SPEAK THEM? Writing Preparation, ADHD, and Becoming a More Effective Mess (Patreon)

Those of you who have been subscribed for the better part of this year, or are active on the Discord, or have seen me at any public event in the last 12 months are probably aware that I'm working on a Super Sekrit Project I am Not Allowed to Name Under Penalty of Death-by-Lawyer.

No, I'm not going to tell you what it is now. I am still Not Allowed.

I can say it's a massive project. The way it's looking at the moment, it will consume at least the next two years of my life, and maybe quite a bit more. I can say it's a giant franchise legacy SF IP, and if I were to tell you what it is, 99.9% of you would recognize it immediately. I can say I'm part of a team, not even close to working alone. And I can say it's the biggest opportunity I've had since my first publishing contract, and one of the most significant things I will ever do with what talent I've got.

STILL NOT TELLING.

I realize I'm edging you and it's cruel. Don't worry, I'm not REALLY devoting the essay this month to dancing around the Thing Itself for giggles. But it's been super tough to be pouring my janky-ass over-enthusiastic nerd-soul into something for a year and change without talking about it! And I finally felt like there was an aspect of the Beast I COULD share and use as a teaching moment without summoning Contract Elementals from the Pit of Intellectual Property Management to feast on my innards. 

It's also important that I explain what the hell is/has been going on with me (other than crippling depression!) before I get into how profoundly this project has changed my writing process. Because if I weren't being forced to, I would do precisely zero of the kind of writerly process activities I now must do every day to bring this bouncing baby beast into the world. 

And I know that's true because I've written 44 books and gone out of my way to never have to do this stuff for the last 19 years.

This essay is about the Parts of the Gig I have avoided, and often, in academic or other instruction-oriented settings where I am an authority, encouraged others to avoid, for my entire career. This is about being forced to go back to basics as a writer almost twenty years in, and how it's changed me, my process, and my head.

And it's an introduction to a series that will unfold over the next year in which I share the techniques that have emerged from the Beastmaking Process that I find useful and interesting enough to want to share them. It'll take awhile to get there, but I'm even going to talk about one within the introduction. Strap in and bear with me.

What the hell am I talking about? Oh god, my darlings, your earnest passionate disaster-of-organization Friend-in-the-North has spent hundreds of hours now worldbuilding, creating characters, nailing down arcs, laying out archetype-maps, storyboarding and whiteboarding plot points, designing crazy SF technology and locations, identifying themes and central questions, analyzing current media trends, and...I shudder to confess...even making spreadsheets. And revising documents 4-7 times before calling them done. 

And all this...gulp...before actually writing any of the Thing Itself at all.

Isn't that just writing, though? Isn't that just the job? Isn't that how it's done? DOESN'T HAVE TO BE. Because to my neurospicy brain, those parts of the writing process have always been fucking lava even the floor wouldn't tolerate. The absolute worst. Literary chore charts about as much fun as mopping and taking out the bins. But that doesn't begin to cover the depth of my antipathy toward any kind of organized writing life. No cutesy metaphor could ever fully express to you how much I fucking hate that shit.

This is the part where I repeat once again that I have severe ADHD. Almost everything about my writing process, inasmuch as it could ever have been called a process, has always been scaffolding attempting to hold up a brain that can do some things few others can, but can't do a whole lot of basic shit everyone else does. 

And I was always like this! When I told my late-Boomer parents I had, and was currently medicated for, ADHD, they were skeptical. I took a deep breath and said "So hey remember how when I was a kid I was always super smart, I tested well, I never stopped reading or thinking or talking about concepts way ahead for my age? But also I couldn't keep my desk or locker organized with a gun to my head, and would just physically lose massive semester-long projects I had fully completed, or just forget they were due until the night before? Remember how I did everything the night before and no amount of trying or tears or systems that worked for you and for my siblings could make me plan an assignment out as soon as I got it and just do a little bit every day?"

And they said: "...oh. Maybe you have a point."

Bu it's really only gotten worse as I've gotten older and worse again once I had a child. Children cannot be life-hacked or worked around. You cannot skip the boring parts. You cannot just forget and hope for the best when it comes to them. So what ability I have ever had to be organized flows toward my son, the actual living human being fully dependent on me, who I only get one chance not screw up too bad. 

The thing about ADHD is it's probably the worst-named mental health condition out there. Even worse since they got rid of ADD and lumped everything in under types of a disorder named for hyperactivity--a symptom a huge percentage of sufferers don't even experience. It's far more about dopamine deficiency, and the accompanying inability to correctly take in and process any miserable scrap of crumpled dopamine that blows by chance across the lonely curb of one's hypothalamus, than it is about hyperactivity or oh look a squirrel or manic pixie dream absent-mindedness or whatever other punchline concerning a pretty fucked-up chemical condition is hot shit these days. 

Look at that fucking sentence. That's a gold-standard ADHD sentence right there. It started out okay, then got over excited about an extended metaphor and the fleeting golden possibility of maybe being able to fully convey the whole range of human feeling on a subject, then it died in a shotgun blast of way too many words, commas, sub-clauses, italics, references to outside media, and swears-for-emphasis. YOU'RE LUCKY THERE'S NO EM DASHES ALL MY HOMIES LOVE EM DASHES AND BY HOMIES I MEAN THE TANGENTS I CAN'T STOP GOING ON TO SAVE MY LIFE.

The sentences in Space Opera are too long? YOU DON'T SAY. Imagine what they were like before editing. Imagine what it's like in my head.

Those sentences are gonna be listed in the DSM-VI as DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA.

And in general, look how long it's taking me to get around to the subject of this essay. How many introductions, excuses, warnings, and prefaces I'm engaging in because I genuinely feel so much shame over my inability to be a normal goddamned person and write an outline before I start a book and I want you to like me so much I can't just say what I mean without 1500 words of explanation and apologies?

Welcome to hell. We do not have cookies. Only despair.

Essentially, we are starving for dopamine (and seratonin to a much lesser extent, unless you also have co-morbid depression which...heyyyyy) all the time. Just ALL THE TIME. Now, everyone wants the happy chemicals. We are all addicted to them. Many, many illegal drugs function by overclocking our system to pump those very chemicals out non-stop. But some of us can metaphorically roll around on a pile of cocaine and still not be able to get high...and for us "high" is just "functioning on a reasonable level at all."

So we chase it like fucking foxhounds, sniffing under every root and branch for a morsel of that good golden hopamine-copamine. We seek it in food, in hobbies, in sex, in social media, in doomscrolling, in learning a PhD's worth of information about the French Revolution in two weeks, in adrenaline-generating activities as a substitute, in interpersonal drama, in over or under-spending, in sensory-overload-seeking, in planning to get fit, very occasionally in actually doing it, in staying up too late, in every conversation, in everything everywhere all at once. We do too much, we're too enthusiastic, we word-vomit constantly because maybe everything in our lives would be okay if we could just communicate one idea clearly to another person. We cling to anything that excites us even a little and run from that which has the merest potential to harm, because our dopamine-dessicated thinkmeats have no chemical padding to handle the small cuts of every day life. And if we have to do a task, we just try to do it all at once somehow, because time hates us and incremental progress feels like no progress at all.

Dopamine is what makes you feel satisfied after completing a task. And a lot of other things like people liking you and accepting you and being interested in you. Which your brain may or may not get a shot of well-being about, but it sure as fuck knows it will only get a full-up glass of DARKMISERYTINI if people DON'T like you and aren't interested, so let me introduce you to Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, a very excellent and useful thing for a writer to have! 

ANYWAY, the promise of dopamine motivates you to perform that task. The anticipation that your brain will get its happy-food creates the possibility of following an incremental, organized methodology toward performing the task. But someone with ADHD has never experienced a reliable path that connects plan the task--do the task--feel good about yourself and life. So it can't initiate any of that because at no point along the way has dopamine/seratonin released when it's supposed to (at the completion of the incremental steps toward the task) if at all. Sometimes you get none at any point so nothing seems to have a purpose or pay-off. Sometimes you only get it long after the task is done and people praise you for it so there seems to be no connection between the work and the joy. Sometimes the only way you can get a drop is to hyperfocus on whatever made your substantia nigra twitch and abandon everything else in your life until you've sucked all the energy out of it and can't remember why it seemed so important in the first place.

And sometimes, some very dangerous times, you can get so much joyjuice in the planning stage of the task that you don't feel the need to ever actually do the work.

And that last one is why I never did literary chore charts. Because I KNOW MYSELF. I know if I let myself do that shit, I will never stop doing that shit and actually write the book. Planning is a huge dopamine trap for me. If I have a book all planned out, it feels like I've already written it, and not only does my brain go JOB WELL DONE OLD CHAPPAROO LET'S TAKE A BREAK FOREVER WE'VE EARNED IT, but any actual attempt to write the words and scenes and chapters of the actual novel whose publication would allow me and mine to eat will be greeted with the same brain throwing boredom tantrums. UGHHHHH WE ALREADY DIIIID THISSSSS EWWWWW IT'S ALREADY ALL USED UP.

So I've spent a career of nearly two decades outracing that dopamine cliff by seizing any idea that makes my jerk-ass brain sparkle and make noise, starting chapter one scene one immediately, and breaknecking through to the end before I can get bored or wander off or find something that sparkles slightly brighter, which I am incapable of not pursuing because my system is literally starving for any kind of happiness all the time.

And I mean, not for nothing, but I've skated by on that pretty well. 

It's come out in a lot of interviews that I never took notes or outlined anything or mapped the nested story structure when I was writing The Orphan's Tales at the tender, unmedicated, undiagnosed age of 22. I absolutely hate talking about that. It feels like bragging. It feels like I'm trying to say I'm a genius. It sounds SO impressive and it is NOT impressive. It was fucking stressful. It was idiotic. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea what ADHD really was, I just knew if I stopped long enough to do any of that, I'd never go back to the actual book. So it was literally easier to write a thousand page duology than to make one single outline. 

That's not a genius, that is a mess.

Now, let's fast forward twenty years to Cat-at-42, suddenly out of nowhere handed a beautiful, rare opportunity to do something that matters so fucking much to her she can barely breathe. And that thing is so big and so complex, with so many moving parts and so many other people and so much money involved, that the only way to actually accomplish it...is to spend years in the planning process doing exactly the kind of things her big dumb starving brain has been avoiding since it before finished slapping play-doh and glitter together and calling it a frontal lobe. And if the hyperfocus stops or slows and that glitter-doh gumdrop gets bored with this, this Beast she loves so dearly, she will never be able to forgive it or show her face to herself.

GOD DAMMIT. 

So yeah, I've been doing a lot of outlines.

Not just outlines, but designing characters in a plot-vacuum and summarizing them IN UNDER ONE PAGE WHAT THE FUCK for others to understand and approve or disapprove, outlining not only a big arc but every individual point along it, then having to let go of things that DID give me the proud-cocktail because this isn't just mine and I'm not in control of what makes it through to the end the way I always have been, except at the point of how well I can construct a well-organized, simple, straightforward, internally coherent, joke/pun-and-tangent-free, and most importantly BRIEF document of short, easy-to-read, declarative sentences.

FUCK. 

I am literally being paid to, and having daily meetings to enforce doing, the very specific thing I find hardest to do. And keep doing it for years. 

And it turns out...to be pretty effective. It's...UGH. It's making me a better writer. It's making me a GREAT pitchman. It's forging new pathways in my brain that will almost certainly end up streamlining everything about me as an artist into a more sustainable, and probably more commercially successful, lifestyle.

GROSS. 

THANKS, I HATE IT.

Oh, Mrs. Kapovich was right about me in the third grade and I'm just SUPPOSED TO ACCEPT THAT? My very first ever review: "If Valente ever calms down, she may be a historically great writer" to which at the time I yelled FUCK YOU I'LL NEVER CALM DOWN had a point, and now I'm meant to just GO ON WITH MY DAY?

THIS IS TERRIBLE. IF IT ISN'T THE HOIST OF MY OWN PETARD.

I actually don't think it's remotely clear to my co-writers that I DO hate this stuff. Because I'm pretty good at it (until we get to the simple, clear, and brief producer-facing documents) which WAS ALWAYS THE WHOLE POINT. I know I'm good at it! That's why I don't do it! Because no one wants to buy the world's most detailed outline and novel-length background worldbuilding bible featuring the names of everyone's great-grandparents' favorite holidays! (Except now when it would seem they do.) They want the book. So I've always focused on the book. But this isn't a book, and I do fully understand that my RADICAL pantser approach cannot work for something of this scope.

Ironically, for awhile this was great. Because it was new. I'd never HAD to do this stuff before, not as long as I could produce a novel another way. Novelty is catnip. Novelty is hopamine. But now I've gotten into the rhythm and I'm just very thankful that working for an established IP means infinite layers of accountability so I physically cannot fall too deep into my usual traps and wander off or otherwise fail even when it's very very important to me that I don't. 

Kind of like the kid. Whose check-in meetings are brutal.

But it's a very strange feeling, for a person who has rarely, if ever, taken longer than six months to actually sit down and write a book (pre-research and ideation + pitching and selling not included), to have been working on this much longer and not be even close to finished. To barely have come to the point of starting that "sit down and write the scenes" part.

And have to constantly remind myself that just because I worked my ass off for X days or weeks doing Y thing doesn't mean the project is over and I can move on to the next one. I can work as hard as I ever have in my life and just have a new mountain in the same range to climb on Monday. 

Not to mention my own projects, who are angrily languishing in the cradle threatening to call CPS. Or the imminent destruction of social media, which I rely on to work and eat and live. Everything is on fire! But at least I made a very pretty pitch for a concept way above my weight in terms of STEM knowledge that I had to stay up all night giving myself a crash-course in astrophysics to gin up. 

Or, more recently, in actually somehow miraculously managing to finally learn how to pitch something in one punchy sentence.

In this case, a character.

So as I said up top, this meandering TRASHFIRE of an essay/ADHD proof-of-concept is essentially an introduction to, and backstory explaining, a series I'll be putting up here at (obviously) random intervals over the course of the Beast's Slouching Toward Release progress. Because as I'm actually forced to behave like a normal writer, there are things that come up that feel particularly useful. Some of them I haven't even heard of/ignored in writing workshops before! At least in the terms that I've come to use them. 

Despite the fact that I'm mostly in charge around here and could leave you with just the introduction, I would feel guilty about that (see above) and as though I had failed and should never be allowed near the internet again, which I already feel enough as it is. (Why does Patreon always update in a rush at the end of the month? Because I literally spend the rest of the month in a paroxysm of anxiety about not being able to produce anything worth all of you).

So here is the first illuminating thing I have to share from my Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Organized Thought.

The Beast will have many characters, obviously. But each one has to be pitched, discussed, revised, and accepted, then revised again. We have a template for that pitch. (I always go way too long. But I'm learning.) Some of them are small wee beasties who don't need arcs and deep motifs, but for the ones that do, I started including a new section in my template. 

The character's central question.

Central questions are usually artifacts of books and shows and movies as a whole--all great SF has them, even if it's just "what would happen if time travel was real?" But I've never really thought about taking that high-level high-concept thing down to a personal level with each character and distilling what the fuck their problem is into a single question, rather than a statement or motto or D&D alignment.

Basically, what a particular character would ask after a moment of extreme breakthrough in therapy. They almost certainly couldn't articulate the question outside of that extremis, but the need to answer it drives their arc. In many ways, that question identifies the beginning of their arc. The answer is its conclusion.

How do I get back to who I used to be? Where do I belong? How can I make my family love me? Can I still be a good person after everything I've done? 

SF is supposed to be big idea fiction, and in some ways, it feels like giving these nascent people an emotional big idea, a personal high-concept that to them is as pressing as the big whizz-bang of the over-arching plot. 

It's been very crystallizing for me, even if some of the phrases feel big and vague. Life is big and vague sometimes. We all want to belong somewhere, but a person whose entire identity is fixated on finding that place and protecting it is a very different creature from one who has found many groups to accept them over the years (family, military unit, company, etc) and is simply currently freelancing their emotional life on the way to the next successful group project. 

Luke Skywalker, for example, fucking desperately wants to belong. And he doesn't really even care what he belongs to, as long as it gives him an identity. He starts out just as determined to go to the academy and be a freaking stormtrooper as he ends up determined to become a Jedi. He's a guy with zero internal locus of control. He needs other people to define him. He instantly bonds with Obi-Wan and agrees to fly off to whereverthefuck with him with barely a second of grief for the people who raised him. Then instantly throws in with Han and Chewie for a morsel of approval from Cool Guys, then instantly with a rebellion he knows virtually nothing about, a rebellion against the very system in which he longed to be a cog YESTERDAY, because hey maybe he belongs with this girl. He then proceeds to fuck up constantly seeking that group of friends who gave him his first taste of not only belonging somewhere, but being an authoritative, heroic figure in that place. 

But it's still just seeking belonging. Maybe I belong with the Jedi. Maybe I belong with my deadbeat dad. Maybe I belong with Yoda. Maybe I belong with my sister I definitely knew about all along. But he'll abandon all the new possibilities no matter the risk for the people who gave him that first taste, seeking the rush of that first sense of purpose, acceptance, status. He's a gaping hole of need casting about for something to fill it. Which is why, for all its many faults, The Last Jedi probably had his number. Maybe I belong with other young Jedi teaching them the way I consistently failed to let others teach me, that way I don't have to lead the galaxy (can't belong if you're in charge) but I still get to be Cool Powerful People's focus and hero oh whoops my nephew appears to suck looks like one answer to this shit is I can never belong with my bio family nor they with me.

(And no, I'm not working on Star Wars. I can just be reasonably sure everyone reading this has seen it.)

These unanswered questions, unanswered traumas, are the gas in the tank of action, as characters seek not only to face the conflict of villains and huge historical events forming around them, but to find some way to satisfy the questions that arose from their peculiar experience, their peculiar damage. Even when we answer these questions, we mostly don't change the behavior patterns they fueled. By the time an answer is achievable, they've become too ingrained. Like dopamine. Answering a base cry to the void can satisfy, but rarely does the effect last, nor does the answer necessarily make us feel great about our choices along the way.

While I doubt I'll be working up one-page character summaries before starting the actual construction of the actual books in the future, I likely will be thinking about the questions that drive my characters in a very explicit way.

Stupid job. Teaching me how to be better. How dare.