Over the years, I’ve done a few school visits and spoken at a couple of events. One question I’m often asked by people wanting to craft their own stories is how do you write that many words? How do you create an entire world and a whole story from start to end without giving up. Many of these people had tried their hands at writing but never actually finished what they set out to achieve. Sometimes because they kept going over the same opening words, sometimes because it was all just too much. Back then, my answer was always,

“Just stick with it. Keep writing new words even if they’re bad and eventually you will have the first draft of an entire manuscript.

You can’t edit and fix what isn’t on the page.”

These are wise words and good advice, but looking back now I realise that wasn’t really an accurate answer for how I wrote. It’s not how I achieved the outcome of an entire story, sometimes in as little time as a few months. Those first drafts were messy, raw, and needed a hell of a lot of edits and rewrites, but they were the bones of a manuscript. The first outline of it taking place, and good god they needed to sit and breathe, so I could come back to them with fresh eyes. But, as I’ve found my way back to crafting worlds and honing old manuscripts, I now realise for me it was never really persistence and maybe I didn’t have the issue of losing interest and it taking to long because once I’d found a character, their world, and a compelling plot I literally could stop typing new words until I’d typed ‘The End.’

Dirty dishes would collect in the sink, clean laundry would pile in the basket, my usual homemade cakes and biscuits would be replaced with something I could grab from the supermarket shelf. Friends I had regular coffee dates with would wonder why I’d disappeared. Because for me, the first draft is the only thing I can think about. They characters are tapping inside my head trying to escape. The worlds sending tendrils of ‘what if’ through my very soul. My dreams filled with scenes and dialogue. For me,

First drafts are all consuming. My fingers bleed words on to the page.

Now, years later I realise that feeling has a name. A diagnoses. You see, ADHD comes with hyper fixation; a trait that blesses me with an intense, prolonged focus on a single task. It makes me hella productive … with drafting, even editing, just maybe not so much on everything else around me.

The downside of this is when I don’t have the words … they just aren’t there, because creativity also needs space to breathe.

Tell me, how do draft — all at once, or adding new words little by little.

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