do you have tips for getting yourself to actually sit down and work on creative projects? my adhd is medicated and yet i still struggle to actually work on the art and writing i deeply want to be doing
i wish i had an easy no-scope solution for you but i fully expect to be struggling with this same problem for the rest of my life. the artists who appear to be able to just churn shit out consistently for years on end are, in my experience, people who've developed a rigorous set of habits and built a lifestyle around their work, or are genetic freaks who've somehow hacked their own adhd into a superpower, or otherwise just don't really have much self-consciousness about the quality of their own work. they are few and far between, and even fewer are those who can maintain that pace indefinitely, but that doesn't stop the rest of the world from holding them up as the examples we should be aspiring towards. needless to say, i don't think that's particularly helpful.
there ARE lessons to be learned from them, to be clear. we tend to get up in our heads about making art because it's often an emotional process, but the reality is that the work part of the work is just that: work. nobody who clocks in at an office job is excited to be there every day, or even any day. sometimes making art is tedious and annoying and you just have to buckle in and do it anyway. a lot of it really is just habits, practice, and projecting a level of confidence that you probably lack. most people's bar of quality for your work is a lot lower than yours, and mistakes that seem obvious to you just plain are not that obvious. we always underestimate our own skills precisely because they're our skills, we acquired them haphazardly and only barely have a grip on how to use them so naturally take them for granted. YOU know how much you don't know, and so that's what you see in your own work. but other people mostly only see what you do know. and your sloppy half-finished sketch may look like magic to another's eyes. and ultimately there's always gonna be haters, you can't please everyone so don't even try, just fucking make the thing and release it. something that exists is better than something that doesn't exist.
yadda yadda yadda we've heard it all before. i know all this stuff intellectually, but it's so much easier to say than it is to practice. obviously we can learn from the crazy success stories, but it's just as important to recognize that you are not and can never be anybody else except yourself. advice that works for someone else might not work for you. the workflow and habit regime of a frighteningly prolific writer might very easily make your output worse. so, really, it's all about knowing yourself. i think probably you asked ME this question because you see me as someone who IS able to sit down and get the work done, and maybe you're even surprised it took me three paragraphs to get to my own process. the thing is, i don't think any artist makes everything they want to make. we're all carrying around a graveyard of unfinished, never-finished projects, and that's just how it is. i don't know that i've ever met an artist who's fully satisfied in that way.
i'm a very feast-or-famine writer. my partner often gets mad at me (lovingly) when i tell her that i wrote 3000 words in a day when she struggled to hit 500, but i always have to remind her that she writes about that much most days of the week, whereas i churn out a TON of material in a couple days and then might not write anything else for weeks if not months. it frustrates me to no end that this is the case, i've tried so many times to build better daily writing habits but it never stick. i do think i'm not doing as much as i could be, but at the end of the day i've always been this way and i will probably always be this way. trying to force myself to work in a different mode usually just makes me feel guilty, pressured, sad, overwhelmed, paralyzed. i'm just not good at it, and without an institutional setting where i've got the support of an editor and other writers i simply don't see myself getting good at it any time soon. so i try to give myself a bit of grace and work with my eccentricities rather than against them.
i will say my insecurities have a lot less sway over me these days now that i've got so much godfeels under my belt, and there are so many people who've read it and shared their opinions. i used to worry a lot about if i could call myself "a real writer", which is absolute bullshit, but i don't worry about that much at all anymore. i have a baseline level of confidence in my writing and process that enables me to not second guess myself as much. but i understand that is almost exclusively psychological, and is an attitude i could have shed a lot sooner if i really wanted to. particularly i have the confidence to recognize when i'm having off day and get some writing done anyway, because i know my first draft doesn't need to be good or even remotely resemble the finished work. sometimes i just need a skeleton to riff off of, and maybe even getting it down in a rough and annoyed fashion is better. it's like, there's a level of scaffolding and structure to writing that is a bit like doing math, and sometimes you do yourself a favor by getting the math out of the way when you're not entirely feeling it so you can hit the ground running artistically when you ARE feeling it. in the spirit of "something is better than nothing," even sloppy chickenscratch bullet point outlines and tiny illegible thumbnails count as work. it's all about knowing what you can get when you can get it, and accepting that some days you're just not gonna get much at all.
a few meat and potatoes tips though. i find with my own adhd meds that i have the most success when i take them as i'm starting my work for the day. if i'm browsing bluesky or checking my tumblr asks when they kick in, for example, i'm gonna end up in a vortex of that for the entire day without even realizing it. i can't tell you how many times i've started answering a question on here thinking, okay, just a short one this time, a little warmup before i get back to work, only to end up spending over an hour writing a six paragraph essay full of dubiously-relevant asides instead of what i should ACTUALLY be working on. so open your doc or canvas or whatever, take your meds, and start working. sit with the tedium, stare at it, force out what little you can manage, and don't click away to other shit if you can help it. when the meds kick in, the gears will start to turn faster and with less effort, and now suddenly you're just doing it. stay hydrated, stay fed, try to do some stretches every once in a while (i'm terrible at this), maybe go for a walk when you hit a wall. if you're feeling grimy, take a shower. i hate that showering helps but sometimes it really does. but mostly, just pay attention to yourself. it's easy to push yourself to keep going when you're in a groove, but your body will usually tell you when it's time to clock out and a lot of the work i do after that point ends up getting thrown out or completely rewritten. pushing yourself too hard too often, holding yourself to too-high standards, guilting yourself for not getting enough done, THESE are the most common culprits behind artistic burnout, in my opinion. all you can do is what you can do, so do it as often as you can and just try, try to learn a few lessons in the process. challenge yourself, take care of yourself, make mistakes, and don't fear the dry spells. they're never as permanent as they feel.
