Tips for writing an essay with executive dysfunction: do this.
Write out bits and pieces of the essay. When you get to a part you can’t/”don’t want to” write, put it in bold brackets. Get as much done as you can and come back in a half an hour or so!
If the executive function is still bothering you, take it one bracket at a time. Don’t delete the bracket until you’re done “filling it in,” so to speak. If you need to take more breaks or hop to the next bracket, you can do that too! Similarly, if you have a thought you want to get down but you aren’t sure how to word it, put it in bold brackets as well!
It may not “cure” the executive dysfunction or procrastination problems, but it makes writing the essay more like putting shapes in holes of the same shape. It can be a pain, but the process is a bit more streamlined and user-friendly.
I know this may not work for everyone, but as someone who has really bad executive dysfunction and problems focusing (thank you, ADHD!) this works REALLY well for me! I hope by sharing it it can help other people (with and without executive dysfunction/adhd) too! o/
As someone with both, this actually works.
I started doing it with fanfic and carried it over to QA/QC testing at work. It’s biggest use is breaking procrastination which gets you in a shitty infinite loop of do-this-don’t-feel-it-oh-webpage-do-this-don’t-want-to-oh-article repeat like a goddamn break command, which for me is the biggest problem.
It visibly breaks down your task (write this thing) into smaller bite-size tasks (write this part of this thing). Each bracket is now a small part; you can almost pretend the big thing it comes from doesn’t even exist.
Do not underestimate how utterly gullible the brain is; you can trick it fairly easily if not consistently.
Two examples:
1.) For QA/QC testing,I write manual tests in spreadsheets where each vertical row is a step and can be fuck-knows how many steps (my record is around ninety-something steps). When my tests start, I have a brain-easy standard; open template with eight visible steps, paste in the standard first step and last two steps, then enter brackets–Step 2: [SSP – Submit FS Application]
Step 3: [STP – TLM here]
Step 4: [TIERS – AppReg]
Step 5: [STP – Appt]
Step 6: [TIERS – Approve App]
–in the remaining five steps. Each of those five steps will be expanded to five or ten or fifty, I have no idea, but right now? There are eight. I can deal with eight. I can lowly expand to more [SSP – Create Account][SSP – Start Application for Food Stamps][SSP – One female HOH under thirty and one female child under five]. Then I throw in the other TLM step because I just remembered I need that.
Now I have
Step 2: [SSP – Create Account]
Step 3: [SSP – Start Application for FS]
Step 4: [SSP – 2 HH, HOH F <30/F < 5]
Step 5: [STP – TLM here]
Step 6: [TIERS – AppReg]
Step 7 [STP – Appt]
Step 8: [STP – TLM here]
Step 9: [TIERS – Approve App]
Then I go away and do something else sometimes, but sometimes, I can keep this up until I’ve mapped most of the test. Each bracket step is replaced with actual step-out instructions eventually and will get to around fifty with this setup, but I have no idea. Each time I open it, it’s still short, and I can visibly see my own progress; just as importantly, my brain thinks it’s done, that I’m just cleaning it up (I have no idea what my brain assumes but it works). It’s not overwhelming; my brain doesn’t lock up at the sheer scope; I know this shit. (I’m actually a relative expert on this shit.)
2.) This is how my journey to non-procrastination actually started. Bear with me, this require some explanations and set-up.
For those reading Down to Agincourt, you’ve probably read my comments about how the storyline went from around 18,000/22,000 to current full count >1.7 million words (>5000 pages) and eight to nine books, not including the one that is all short stories. All of it, except the short stories, is in a single massive Master document I reguarly (and paranoidly now) back up.
Until roughly mid-2015, it never occurred to me there was anything to break up, despite the honestly uncomfortable load time. This despite the fact at this point it had automated word count and automated scene count and a timeline created in a massive Excel spreadsheet that also houses a full character list and vital statistics. It’s not like I didn’t see the word count and number of characters and massive timeline with scene breakdown every day, right? I’d talk about it to people.
So how is it that until roughly half-way through posting Map of the World, I really wasn’t entirely aware of how fucking huge this was? How do you go from 18K to around a million words in three and a half years and not really realize it? That’s around 700-800 words a day if I wrote every day. And yet.
Here we go; this is the setup.
You may have noticed the – Day X – that appear in chapters and sometimes cross chapters. Those weren’t actually some kind of style decision originally; they were just timestamps for scenes I wanted to write for my totally this is a writing exercise while coming out of severe depression and later, my dad’s death. That was literally it; I wasn’t writing linearly, I was being chased by depression and using words between it and me, and to do that, I wrote whatever came into my head, which was a shitload of my Id in action.
(Like many people with clinical depression, the worst possible thing is the apathy; the only way for me personally to avoid that is to do something, anything that can lock my mind to the here-and-now, and apparently, this goddamn story was what worked.)
While trying to track down porn scenes–unsurprisingly, I really liked re-reading and working on those–I started using bookmarks to jump around, but Word’s interface for them sucked. I needed something better, and this segued beautifully into my second favorite self-soothing method: scripting. Back in the day, I’d learned HTML and CSS so I could post my fic on a webpage and not just usenet; this led to buying a domain and running an archive or two. My best method of learning something new is a clear and reachable goal, and my best defense against depression is work: it was the perfect storm.
So I learned VBA, how to write an add-in, and created a new Word bookmarker with an easy pop-up interface I could open from the ribbon or quick access toolbar. Then I mapped the entire story by my pre-existing Day X timestamp, quite literally to find my favorite scenes, and noted bookmark + description in a very simple spreadsheet timeline that’s turned into two very large spreadsheets because that happened.
Unintended consequence:
In my head, the story was not–what it is–but a series of days. When each day period got too long and I had to scroll a lot through it, I’d bookmark right before a favorite scene –Day X_A – –Day X_B– so I could find it. When I opened the doc, I never really looked at it; I opened my bookmark interface and went to what I wanted to write. Eventually, I had a function to bookmark my last position temporary so it would jump there immediately on open so half the time, even the sheer number of bookmarks didn’t penetrate; in other words, my sense of scope was roughly four paragraphs to thirty pages aka the min/max space between two bookmarks. Even when I started tracking word count–again, I’d learned VBA so why not add that to the spreadsheet?–it wasn’t real. That was scripting, how I self-soothed, and in a completely different medium, not writing. They were–to my brain–entirely unrelated things.
To my brain, one document meant it was one story and a story doesn’t sound long, does it? The bookmarking meant this one document is one story that is never more than roughly thirty pages long at any given time, or the min/max between two bookmarks.
According to my brain, Agincourt overall is one story of about thirty pages written. Even now.
When I do final edits, I copy the chapter into another document with bookmarks and save. The longest chapter I posted was forty thousand words. It was bookmarked into ten page increments at my favorite scenes to edit.
According to my brain, Agincourt is overall one story of about ten pages to edit.
This is what I mean about tricking your brain.
This wasn’t deliberate or something I thought about until I started posting Map of the World, at which time I briefly and horrifically realized actual fucking scope.
Then I thought about what happened, shifted this to my work life, and got a raise, a promotion, and a reputation for being really organized, detail oriented, with an incredibly strong work ethic, and incredibly smart, and I am really fucking not.
(I’d learned VBA, and work is spreadsheet oriented. I used this method to literally map out every screen of an entire program with all options in a multisheet spreadsheet over two months–talk about insane fucking scope–and wrote in functions to navigate it in bite-sized pieces; the whole is unreal and as it turns out, had a side effect of being both incredibly useful to a startling number of people but also tricked them into thinking I know shit. This kind of changed my work life forever. Recently when I went up to defend a bug report someone actually said: “I’d trust her over my own eyes. It’s definitely valid; check it again.” I mean sure, I was right, but holy fuck that happened? Do they know my laundry hills qualify as mountains and I’m down to one fork because I haven’t done dishes–uh, in a while? I can and have lost my own shoes under my own table for days.)
Specific examples I remember of how this worked.
a.) For It’s the Stars That Lie, fully a third of the entire length didn’t exist except in brackets for scenes between other scenes. I called all of them [More here]. I still have a lot of those throughout later books.
b.) For those who read A Thousand Lights in Space, the entire beginning in Ichabod–ALL OF IT–looked something like this:
[Day X – Ichabod – Main street like Bartlett?]
[Alison and Dean talk]
[More here]
So I could indulge myself with something like thirty pages or something of Dean and Cas in the cabin eating and being passive aggressive about the laptop and wandering around the camp digging holes.
c.) For The Game of God, the entire action Croat sequence outside the walls with Dean and co was this
[ Run, fight Croats, northwestern door, make out in snow]
Followed by Dean and Cas making out in the snow scene. At one point, early on, this led to sex nearby but as you are aware, that part was necessarily cut for death scenes and gods being born and Roman women being dramatic.
Brain? Tricked. Due to reasons which I’ve discussed, I had to stop final edits of the end of Game of God and moved to edit later books that don’t have those specific triggers. It still works brilliantly for those, and I’ve been using it to tentatively edit Game of God in single page increments and making progress, though it probably helps that I’ve been on medication that’s slowly but surely working.
The specific actions taken here aren’t necessarily applicable to most people, but the method is. Break down your task into discrete tasks and if needed, each discrete task into more, smaller tasks. Find the ones you want to do, skip the ones you don’t now. Come back and look at the ones you don’t want to do. Break those down until you find parts you do. Repeat.
When your brain rebels and starts the cycle, do something else to break out of it. It can be a related task that exists or, like me learning VBA because that shit’s fun, it’s a task that didn’t exist but I created because I really wanted to do it and then made it related.
(Note: If you want the Work bookmarker, it’s an add-in you are welcome to email me for and works in all office versions. I wrote it from scratch by hand so it’s safe. It is really really cool.)