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Post by Siana Blackwood on Mar 15, 2018 9:11:58 GMT
So, on Twitter yesterday someone posted a definition of a thing called 'Executive Dysfunction': ) Since that was almost literally my background mental noise (except substitute 'study' and 'Twitter') as I read the tweet, I decided I needed to learn more about this thing. I read a few articles and found this one particularly interesting because it talks about how Executive Dysfunction can affect planning and organisation: 3 Symptoms of Executive Dysfunction – And How Not Recognizing Them Might Result in Ableism. (It's probably a good idea to pause here and read that article, btw.) A while back on Steve, we had a challenge called "I have a plan! Attack!" where we were trying to fully plan, write, and edit a novel. Or something like that, anyway. It didn't work, and after reading that article I'm about 90% sure the challenge was basically an illustration of how Executive Dysfunction affects writers. And, as Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 commented on Twitter, this resembles what we've referred to in the past as 'writer's block'. So basically, I'm hoping we can talk about this, and about ways to overcome and/or work around this sort of issue. Also, share resources, links to things, and so on. I probably should say more about it, but I've been poking at this intermittently for the past few hours and the longer I don't post it the higher the risk of something eating the entire post, so... here we are. Go for it.
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Post by Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 on Mar 15, 2018 22:22:39 GMT
I shared this on the Discord as well.
JOIN USSSS!!! >:-D
You won't have to use such long blocks of text. Easy on the mind. >:-D
This is me.
I have always known that I don't get this mythical Writer's Block that all these writers rage at us doesn't exist, and we're just being lazy, and BICFOK will fix it, dammit!
BICFOK doesn't fix it. My brain still won't work.
And that's because I'm fighting on multiple levels, whereas traditional block just has the one - and for some people, it's that easy. Get your fingers moving, and the ideas flow, simple as opening a tap.
For me, it's...
When I'm well, truly well, it is like that. I don't even have to try to write, except to carve out some time and sit down.
But most of the time, I'm not well. I'm sick, burnt out, anxious, dead, and I have E. D.
This is the thing that I've been referring to as Writer's Block all my life, but it's not. Now I know what it is.
I don't GET Writer's Block. I just get dead.
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Post by Allie on Mar 22, 2018 15:34:35 GMT
I talk sometimes - though clearly not here yet - about how there are a few words that I learned that literally changed my life. Executive dysfunction is one of the big ones. Just knowing that there was a word for that was literally life-changing in how it allowed me to effectively talk or even think about my depression and anxiety, about what was going on, about why some days are better than others or different or just off. Because this is me, too. I can spend a whole day at my desk nearly or literally crying about things that I need and want to do, unable to concentrate on or enjoy other things, and yet still be unable to actually go do them. It's the main thing that taking wellbutrin has changed about my life - when I have a wellbutrin prescription, I'm functional, and when I don't, I'm not. It really is that simple. It doesn't affect my anhedonia as much, I'm still depressed and I'm still anxious - though less so, because so much of my anxiety is tied to things that I haven't done. *** Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 , I have to disagree with you about writer's block. It's never been a clearly defined thing in my experience; it's more a catch-all term, with a lot of things that can be happening behind the scenes. For me, executive dysfunction is my writer's block, or the cause of it, or at least a bloody lot of it. Because for years I would get so upset at myself because I would sit at my computer and I would open my writing programs and I would put my hands on the keyboard and then I just. wouldn't. write. Now I know why, and I can account for it, and take steps to alleviate it. *** Siana Blackwood , I think discussing ways for us to handle executive dysfunction in the specific area of writing is a great idea! I've seen some things going around Tumblr from time to time on executive-dysfunction-specific life hacks - things people do that account for the fact that they have it and work with it instead of trying to force through it and be neurotypical. Examples include having two or three trashcans in every room so that there's always one within reach (because getting up to throw something away just isn't going to reliably happen), or having three hampers in the room: clean, dirty, and figure-it-out-later - because sometimes the simple act of putting laundry away or figuring out which of the things on the floor are clean is a lot. So, then, what sorts of things might help in the specific case of us poor writery people? I think part of the solution might be trying to drill down to the roots of what is actually stopping us. a lot of times what kills executive dysfunction people is cascading tasks. For example, I need to eat, but to do that I need to make food, and in order to make food I have to get up and cross the room and check the fridge and wash the dishes I'll need and get out the ingredients and then maybe I need to chop them or mix them and at that point I'm just gonna stay at my desk and starve. Sometimes recognizing this and trying to take it one step at a time helps. (Sometimes it doesn't.) But if I'm feeling good at another point, but not hungry, maybe I can get the dishes caught up (haha) and then set out all the dishes that I'll need to make a food later, so that it's that much fewer steps; I can just get up, walk over, grab the ingredients, and start. If all that's accepted as a given - well, where are the pain points? What can we do in writing to decrease the number of steps, or do some of them ahead of time, or do the authorial equivalent of having three trash cans in the room? A few proposals: - Always have a way to capture writing in a hurry. Keep a text document open on your computer that you can tab to. Have a writing program on your phone that opens quickly and easily. (Evernote can work for this; I used to use an Android text editor called Draft, but it's no longer supported and that's becoming more of a problem as time goes on.) Maybe try alternate methods of capturing writing - I keep trying to make audio notes work for myself because it's so easy for me to talk out dialogue. Go back to like the third piece of advice in every writing suggestions list ever written, and carry a notebook. And a pen. That's important.
- Keep the actual writing project you're working on open, if possible. Sometimes I catch myself not writing for hours because first I need to open Scrivener and open the writing project and create a new scene and figure out where that scene goes and maybe fix the formatting and
- Actually that's all I have right now please god somebody have more ideas that will work
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Post by Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 on Mar 22, 2018 18:15:59 GMT
Allie Fair enough. I should say, I just hate the term Writer's Block, because it is such a catch-all for every combination of everything that could possibly be going on behind the scenes, that nobody knows what anyone is talking about anymore. Everyone has a different definition, but nobody realizes that this is, in fact, the case. For person 1, it is certainly just a matter of being lazy - so when person 2 says that they're depressed, sick, have E. D. or whatever, person 1 shouts them down saying that Writer's Block doesn't exist, because FOR THEM, it's just the one thing. That said, I totally understand how you defined Writer's Block. It's semantics. What I have is what you have, therefore, logically, I deal with the same Writers' Block. I just recently decided for myself not to call it Writers' Block, in favor of more precise terms that refer to invisible illnesses rather than Normal People Shit. Well. Yes, I still have to deal with Normal People Shit, but after finding all these new terms that suddenly told me what my mental problems were, and I factored them out, I realized that I suddenly understood what all those ragers were talking about. When all else is well, I really don't get Writers' Block, and BICFOK really does work - because suddenly I have enough energy that I don't have to THINK about every little thing! My new psychiatrist just switched me to Prozac. I've only been on it for a week The shadow behind my gripe with the term Writers' Block is that I've seen way too many toxic articles and tweets, even from famous writers, screaming and raging that Writers' Block doesn't exist! Fucked me over for YEARS, I tell youse, because for the longest time I thought I was just a failure, even though I KNEW that there was something different about my own brain. Took me YEARS more to de-train myself from replicating and mirroring that same toxic thinking back at myself in order to excise the guilt. In which I go off about off-thread-topic stuff: One-level anxiety for me. I mean, I am always going to have to deal with the anxiety, depression, E.D., whatever. - but like hell am I going to let anything make me feel anxious and guilty about feeling anxious and guilty, and then beating myself up about feeling that way. That's Second and Third Thoughts gone WAY wrong right there, and the danger of analysis paralysis when used on emotion. I'm particularly susceptible to this simply because of my personality type.
I'm a robot, okay. I don't deal well with emotion, especially my own. Most of the time I either feel nothing, or I feel some soupy combination of bad feelings, but often have NO CLUE what it is I'm feeling - whether I'm angry, scared, sad, or what. If I can optimize my emotion handler mechanism such that it only has one level to parse, so much the better. Also that whole sitting at the computer and crying because I couldn't get anything done was me last night. >.<
Re: The Siana Section Wow. I never realized that I was neurodivergent. I am, though. Wow. All my life I always KNEW that something was different about how my brain worked, and I always knew that I struggled in ways that other people never did, and that it has held me back from living up to my true potential. OH MY GOD THE GARBAGE CAN THING I DO THAT At least, I have...er...piles of trash on the floor, and usually a trash bag within reach of the place where I usually sit. Usually my desk is messy, but it's a clean mess. These past few months though, when I was REALLY sick, it actually turned into a cesspit. My mother: Why must you live in filth? You can at least pick things up and throw them away while you're sitting down! Me: ...No. No, I actually physically cannot. My mother: Avada Kedavra. But yeah, once the new antidepressant hit, I was able to clean up some...just some. Also, I don't even bother folding clothes. I just have baskets of clean laundry that I pull clothes from to wear everyday. I also never buy clothes that I have to iron, so this doesn't become a problem.
Re: Actual writing things. * I do the Evernote thing. It helps...in a way. What ACTUALLY happens is, I have a bunch of piddly little notes full of plot outlines, ideas, and scraps of dialogue, that I somehow never actually get around to organizing. At least I can ensure they stay in the proper notebooks though. I also have a notebook that I call Inbox, where I dump all miscellaneous. That way I only have to look in one place for very random things, because who has the energy to be descriptive? My Evernote:
* I will post back as and when I think of things that help me. I can't right now. I can't think. * Sleep deprivation definitely makes it worse. [/i][/i]
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Post by Allie on Mar 24, 2018 13:00:13 GMT
Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍Funnily enough, those are exactly the reasons that I feel writer's block is such an important term to defend. I think a better way to think of it is this. Writer's block is a symptom, not a diagnosis. BICHOK and other common suggestions for dealing with it are ways of treating the symptoms. Sometimes taking cough syrup will help with the cough, and sometimes that's enough. But sometimes the cough is a sign of something more serious, and expecting cough syrup to treat pneumonia just as well as it treats an irritated throat is at best misguided. Claiming that coughs don't exist because they're so easily treatable and telling people with a cough to just go drink cough syrup and stop claiming to be sick is asinine. I know I get writer's block. For years I was drinking cough syrup, sucking on lemon drops, and BICHOKing to cure my pneumonia because so many people told me coughing was a choice. I didn't need to hear that writer's block wasn't real, I needed to hear that if drinking hot soothing tea isn't helping, I might have executive dysfunction or pneumonia. To me, your solution - stop calling it writer's block and start calling it something more specific - is off the mark. That's like saying that because so many people say that coughs don't exist, the solution is to only refer to hacking, wheezing, croup, throat tickle, phlegm buildup, whooping diaphragm spasms, and other such more specific terms. But they're all coughs, and not everybody knows how to tell them apart, and some of those are going out of their way to avoid saying the word, and ultimately it's harder to learn what your core problem is if you can't start by saying "I have a cough." re: off-topic stuff - Yes, dear god, yes. I wish I was as successful at not feeling anxious and guilty for feeling anxious and guilty. I'm lucky enough to not have to work that hard to figure out what I'm feeling though. Good luck, that's a pita to deal with.
*** I feel you so hard about being able to clean up some - but only some. That's my experience right now with finally having my antidepressants back. I'm finally cleaning up a a little bit faster than the messes are being made, most of the time, but there are still good days and bad days. Theoretically this will eventually reach an equilibrium where my general state of home cleanliness fluctuates around a higher level. But right now I'm still catching up on all the things that fell behind when I was off my meds. I'm going to be doing that for a long while. I'm still trying to decide whether a big forced productivity spree will be beneficial (I get to that higher equilibrium state and can then maintain it) or detrimental (I get to that higher equilibrium state and then collapse for a month). Ultimately I think it's going to be necessary regardless. *** Regarding the notes, yeahhhhhh. That happens to me too. Using a digital inbox for notes pending sorting helps a lot. So does using a physical notebook - in theory, when I sit down to digitize my notes, they're all there sequentially so that I make some kind of categorization decision regarding even the smaller ones. (What actually happens is I have about sixteen portable notebooks and maybe eight digital note categorization systems.) God help me.
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Post by Siana Blackwood on Mar 26, 2018 8:12:57 GMT
I have mixed feelings about the term writer's block. I want it to be a useful starting point for discussion of more detailed symptoms, but it seems to be difficult if not impossible to use it that way. As soon as the phrase is used, any productive conversation is buried under advice like 'take a bath' or 'go for a walk' or a surprising amount of times 'make sure you're properly hydrated'. Or, the really harmful one: 'you're blocked because you're doing it wrong'. And, if those things don't help, maybe you're not really meant to be a writer. Whereas... yeah, the conversation needs to go on to say that if the quick-fix ideas aren't what I need, then I should start looking at the possibility that what I'm calling writer's block is a visible symptom of something else.
The thing is, there doesn't seem to be an organised way to find out stuff like this. I discovered the term 'executive dysfunction' because someone posted it on Twitter. Serendipity is all very well and good, but... well, basically it doesn't change anything. Knowing a word for it doesn't suddenly make it any easier for me to cope with situations where it's a factor. All it really does is make me feel like I'm not coping as well as I thought I was - I'm really just being tossed back and forth between various aspects of how my brain is wired. I might think I'm making a clear and rational decision that the story I'm trying to write is fatally flawed and the best strategy is to start something else, but looking back on it later my reasoning is full of holes, and it looks like I just went into meltdown for no reason. My attempts at developing coping strategies are just... I don't know. The things I thought were helping me control my life seem to be just a complicated maze of ways to avoid hitting a patch of faulty wiring, and they don't work anywhere near as well as I try to tell myself they do.
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Post by Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 on Mar 26, 2018 23:48:27 GMT
I have mixed feelings about the term writer's block. I want it to be a useful starting point for discussion of more detailed symptoms, but it seems to be difficult if not impossible to use it that way. As soon as the phrase is used, any productive conversation is buried under advice like 'take a bath' or 'go for a walk' or a surprising amount of times 'make sure you're properly hydrated'. Or, the really harmful one: 'you're blocked because you're doing it wrong'. And, if those things don't help, maybe you're not really meant to be a writer. Whereas... yeah, the conversation needs to go on to say that if the quick-fix ideas aren't what I need, then I should start looking at the possibility that what I'm calling writer's block is a visible symptom of something else. Exactly. Allie while I understand that whole reasoning that Writer's Block is a catch-all term, and that you need to diagnose what's causing it, which could be anything, I'm kind of with Siana. The problem is that people DON'T see it that way - as a cough that could either be cured by cough syrup, or which is indicative of pneumonia. They think that anyone who has a cough must only have a cough, and completely discount other, deeper, more harmful causes. The thing that happened to Siana happened to me. It's like, the minute you say you have writer's block, you're buried under a whole pile of well-intentioned "go take a walk!" "go do the dishes!" "take a break!" "are you hydrated?" "bicfok!" "But you guys, that's not it! I know it's not because I've DONE all of those things--" Out comes the hate. After a while, it gets REALLY, REALLY old, having to justify my state to everyone EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. "But guys, there really is something wrong! Please help!" "Well, you're not writing. Maybe you're not meant to be a writer." For FUCK'S sake. I LOVE writing. Never mind that I genuinely have multiple (yes, multiple) illnesses, both physical and mental, that sap my energy and steal my spoons, which I can only ride out. I'm a writer, dammit. Let's just say that this view causes real harm. Fucked me over for years. I was fighting my own brain. Still am. But I blamed myself for YEARS thinking I was a failure because of the glut of unhelpful articles out there written by oblivious writers making blanket statements that if you don't write you CANNOT be a writer, that the ONLY thing that can POSSIBLY be blocking you is lack of BICFOK. Well, guess what. BICFOK isn't enough in my case, because I also need spoons. Those who have unlimited spoons cannot even conceive of what it is like to simply have the words flow once you sit down and start, and to have the luxury of only having laziness to get over, or even the luxury of BEING lazy. So until people start taking YOUR (Allie's) view, that WB is a symptom to be troubleshooted (troubleshot?) (which the majority don't), I'm afraid that I AM uncomfortable with using Writer's Block to describe what is happening to me. In my mind, I AM blocked, but it's not the standard causes. It seems to me that this requires... A Blog Post. Written by Somebody. Who is Not Me, Because I Don't Have The Spoons. Hey guys, didja know that Steve has a blog? Maybe we could do some collaborative blog shit or something, so that none of us is required to keep up with a blog on our own, but we could all still together be productive? Collaborative productivity? I think our discussions have created a really good breeding ground for blog-worthy ideas. The thing is, there doesn't seem to be an organised way to find out stuff like this. I discovered the term 'executive dysfunction' because someone posted it on Twitter. Serendipity is all very well and good, but... well, basically it doesn't change anything. Knowing a word for it doesn't suddenly make it any easier for me to cope with situations where it's a factor. All it really does is make me feel like I'm not coping as well as I thought I was - I'm really just being tossed back and forth between various aspects of how my brain is wired. I might think I'm making a clear and rational decision that the story I'm trying to write is fatally flawed and the best strategy is to start something else, but looking back on it later my reasoning is full of holes, and it looks like I just went into meltdown for no reason. My attempts at developing coping strategies are just... I don't know. The things I thought were helping me control my life seem to be just a complicated maze of ways to avoid hitting a patch of faulty wiring, and they don't work anywhere near as well as I try to tell myself they do. Exactly. I wouldn't mind terminology so much if there WAS a way to find out stuff like this, but there isn't. I only found out because somebody on Discord mentioned it. Everything you said Siana. We're fighting our own brains, and since our brains are coming up with the strategies, that's why we fail and flail. How do you know what's wrong when you don't even know what you're feeling? When you fall into the pit so often that you don't have good and bad days, you have Bad Days and Really Bad days? How can you call yourself a writer when most days you choose between dragging yourself to the kitchen to get food, or showering? Forget laundry. At this point, I'm just like...at least I have the word, even if I don't have a solution. I'm just looking at my to do list and I'm torn between frustration and hating myself. My brain WANTS to get something done - but I am too drained to do anything on this list. I started with a few small items and finished them, so the rest is...not small things. I feel like I have no right to complain because frankly, the problems I face are the same ones every day. I talk about them once, and then we all discuss them, and then I temporarily feel better, but then, the next day, I have to do the same thing over again. Broken record. Today I finally opened some packages that have been sitting in my office for weeks. I was tired at the end of it. I still haven't put that shit away. Now instead of boxes I just have a bunch of soap sitting around on the floor. I tried cleaning my desk, but as soon as I got rid of some shit, more came in to be sorted, so sedimentary layers are piling up again. I can't keep up with anything, let alone writing. My family knows and kind of understands, I guess. Somebody just gave me some food. I don't even want to eat. Half the time I eat only because I have to, and the food is right there. If I was more on my own, I know I'd skip a ton of meals. This has diverged from writing. I don't know. It's just, I can barely even get out a sentence - not because I can't physically put words to screen, because I can do that, but because my brain is too physically tired even to initiate the process of letting a scene evolve. How the hell am I supposed to plan out a story? How the hell am I supposed to come up with something to write, when I can't even rub two words together mentally? I am literally a trash monkey at a keyboard right now.
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Post by kevinjbartolotta on Apr 11, 2018 19:34:56 GMT
I might think I'm making a clear and rational decision that the story I'm trying to write is fatally flawed and the best strategy is to start something else, but looking back on it later my reasoning is full of holes, and it looks like I just went into meltdown for no reason. My attempts at developing coping strategies are just... I don't know. The things I thought were helping me control my life seem to be just a complicated maze of ways to avoid hitting a patch of faulty wiring, and they don't work anywhere near as well as I try to tell myself they do. (And pardon me for jumping in) But for all the good things going on in the discussion, this is very much the heart of the issue for me. My brain wants to create a narrative for why I'm acting against my own desires & best interests. It's a bit of a low-confidence thing, but more me trying to cobble together rationalizations and act on them before I actually take stock. Arg, wasted yearz! But I had never heard this term before, makes a lot of sense.
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Post by Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 on Apr 11, 2018 23:41:10 GMT
You are very much welcome to jump in! This thread is open to all! I wish I had advice. I like to think that I know myself fairly well, but even I don't know how my brain works. I just poke it with a stick until something good pops out, write down what I did, and do that thing again. I can barely rub two words together right now, and I'm trying to parse these words, and for some reason, I no longer can. It's not you guys, it's me. I was able to read fine earlier. I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I spent years wondering why other people seem to be able to churn out even a crappy short story in a week, whereas it takes me months of writing scattered words before suddenly I assemble them all together into a crappy draft. I don't know.
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Corvid
Dalek
Worldbuilding: that great time-gobbler
Posts: 161
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Post by Corvid on Jun 8, 2018 23:13:53 GMT
I don't have the energy to respond to them atm, but I read what all of you have said and I'm processing. You said all of it so well. Much of it, I relate to but don't have the... idk, I guess the energy... to figure out how to say.
I have heard that a good way to tell that it might be Exec Dysfunction is if you also can't do things you want to do. That helps me when I feel guilty about it. So I can't put away laundry! I also couldn't get up for some chocolate chips. That's just how it is to live in this meat-body.
Goal-setting is hard. Will setting ambitious goals motivate me to work hard? "Even if I miss, I land among the stars"? Or am I setting myself up for horrible failure followed by guilt-depression brain cocktail? It varies, seemingly dependent on the locations of planets and whose dog sneezed in Lithuania at 5 pm. It's not even consistent within a category of thing. I could try the same thing 5 different times and sometimes I can do it and sometimes not. I don't ever know unless I try.
I really hate the specific scenario that goes like so.
Me: I have to do this! Brain: Nope. You can't. We're going to put it off for weeks. Me: Cool, I see I have no choice. I will do something else productive. Brain, at random: Okay, now! Me: What?! Brain: You can do it now! But only for two minutes. Then you won't be able to ever again. Me: But I'm in the middle of something right now! Brain: Do the thing before I change my mind. And say "I'm a dancing monkey."
I hate it, but I am also grateful for the crumbs. It's so great when I have those productive spurts. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to trip those intentionally.
Apologies for necro'ing a ded thred.
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Post by Jᴀy V. Aꜱᴛᴇʀ 💀🐍 on Jun 9, 2018 2:15:12 GMT
Nah, thread necromancy is allowed here because it's such a small, slow, quiet forum.
Also. That thing about not being able to do even the things I want to do. It me.
I can't do laundry.
I also can't read a book. :-(
I have NO spoons.
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