Category: Process · Tags: writing, adhd, craft, editing
I haven’t written an honest blog post in a while, and I think part of the reason is that honesty, for me, usually shows up mid-sentence, sideways, while I’m trying to do something else. I’ll sit down to write fiction and end up arguing with myself about structure, or cadence, or whether a piece belongs in one category or another, and by the time I realize what’s happening I’ve drifted three decisions away from the original task and feel like I’ve failed at focus when really I’ve just uncovered something that needed naming.
I write with ADHD. That’s not an explanation I’m offering for permission, and it’s not something I’m trying to romanticize. It’s just the operating context. It shapes how I draft, how I edit, and especially how I think while I’m in the middle of a piece and my brain refuses to respect clean stages or polite sequencing.
A lot of writing advice assumes a tidy process. Draft first. Edit later. Don’t interrupt the flow. Keep the editor out of the room until the creative work is done.
That model has never worked for me, and the older I get, the less interested I am in pretending it should.
When I’m drafting, my brain flags problems immediately. Sentence rhythm that’s doing too much work. Repetition that feels easy instead of intentional. Logic gaps that will absolutely trip me later even if they’re technically “fine” right now. If I ignore those signals in the name of momentum, they don’t disappear. They pile up, and by the time I reach the end of a draft I’m not energized, I’m irritated, because I already know I’ve built something that needs demolition instead of refinement.
Editing while drafting isn’t self-sabotage for me. It’s containment. It’s how I keep a piece from becoming fragile.
This is the part that looks like distraction if you’re watching from the outside.
I’ll be editing a paragraph and suddenly I’m thinking about sentence fragmentation, then about whether fragmentation is actually serving this piece or just signaling “intensity” out of habit, then about the fact that this is slash fiction and whether slash actually needs that signal, then about how readers will encounter the story, then about where it lives on my site, then about whether it needs its own landing page because it doesn’t quite belong with the other categories I’ve built.
At some point I’m staring at the ceiling thinking, wait, how many landing pages do I even have now, and why does my brain care about this when I was supposed to be fixing a single line of dialogue.
From the outside, that looks like losing focus. From the inside, it feels like my brain scanning for misalignment. These jumps almost always happen when there’s an unresolved decision somewhere in the system, usually about tone, identity, or expectation, and my attention refuses to stay put until that decision is acknowledged.
I can fight that and spiral, or I can recognize the signal, jot it down, and come back to the sentence with less static in my head.
This came into focus while I was working on my second Disney slash piece.
Slash comes with expectations. So do I. Fragmented emphasis. Breathless cadence. A kind of looseness that signals heat and immediacy. Those tools work for a lot of writers, and I’ve used them myself, but while drafting this piece I realized I was leaning on them out of habit, not necessity.
That realization was uncomfortable. There was a moment of, why am I overthinking this, people are here for the sex. And yes, they are. But they’re also here for power dynamics that make sense, for tension that accumulates instead of diffusing, for scenes that feel controlled even when they’re explicit.
Stripping out fragments and tightening sentences didn’t make the work colder. It made it legible. It forced me to let consequence do the work instead of formatting, and once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.
I can still hear my eighth-grade English teacher in moments like this, tapping the side of my paper with a red pen and telling me that a sentence needs to know what it’s doing, that nouns and verbs are not optional, that if I’m going to get carried away I still have to land somewhere, and I remember hating that at the time because it felt like rules instead of expression, like someone trying to fence in my thoughts before they’d finished running.
It took years to realize she wasn’t trying to kill my voice. She was teaching me how to come back from the edge without falling apart on the page.
That voice shows up now not as scolding, but as a stabilizer, especially when my brain wants to do everything at once.
I caught myself framing all of this the wrong way, as if I were pushing slash fiction up to meet me, or refusing to bring my range down to meet genre expectations. That framing implies a hierarchy that isn’t actually there.
This isn’t vertical. It’s selective.
Genres tell readers why they’re here. Erotic charge, intimacy, transgression, power. Those are the promises. The tools used to deliver them are choices, not obligations. For me, clarity reduces cognitive load. Clean sentences keep me anchored. Fragment-heavy prose, right now, does the opposite.
That doesn’t make my approach better. It makes it mine.
While editing, I also found myself thinking about site structure, about whether this slash work belongs with my other shorts, about whether it needs its own landing page, about the fact that I already have four major content lanes and a fifth that is very intentionally buried and not part of public navigation.
Those questions didn’t come from procrastination. They came from boundary pressure. When a piece of work crosses into a different identity space, my brain wants to know where it lives. Containers matter. Clear framing protects readers and protects me, and pretending those questions don’t exist just means they’ll interrupt me later, usually when I have less patience to deal with them.
When I try to force linear focus, I don’t become more productive. I become brittle. I second-guess everything. I burn energy pretending not to notice problems I will absolutely have to solve later.
When I allow controlled pauses, mid-draft edits, and the occasional meta-question, the work moves forward cleanly. Not always faster in the moment, but with far less drag overall.
That’s not a hack. It’s accommodation.
I’m writing this down because naming the pattern reduces its power. My process isn’t messy because I lack discipline. It’s adaptive because my brain surfaces everything, whether I ask for it or not.
Readers don’t need to understand my process to enjoy the work. They just need the work to hold.
Clarity, restraint, and consequence aren’t accidents in my writing. They’re choices. And learning to make those choices in a way that works with my brain instead of against it has been the difference between fighting the page and actually finishing it.
Now that this is out of my system, I’m going back to the edit.
— Calder N. Halden
Back to the sentence. Back to the work.
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