some non-sequiturs on life, death and writer's block

Lots of thoughts swirling in my head right now.

Brownie's grandfather finally died late Saturday evening after having a massive stroke on Thursday night.  There's a memorial service on Thursday morning.  I feel funny calling it a funeral or anything else because, although knowing he'll be missed, Brownie and family seem to be having a difficult time going through the "mourning" process.  There isn't really anything to "mourn" - he suffered a catastrophic stroke a few minutes after bowling a turkey.  He was mentally and physically in very good form, and lived a long and very happy life.  Like if anything it's actually something to aspire to.  Live happy and die on a high note.

Meanwhile, the death and surrounding activities have come with the sort of family reunion that these sorts of things tend to have.  Brownie's sister and brother-in-law just got into town today.  She's six months pregnant with their first kid (whom they've nicknamed something utterly unspellable)(and I'm not a bad speller!).  We had dinner at Brownie's parents with them.  The dinner was punctuated by Brownie's sister grabbing the hand of the nearest person and clutching it to her belly, hoping we'd be able to feel the babbybump kick.  It was really fun.

And somewhere in the back of my head I get this horrible thought about "wow, circle of life, how very twee is all of this."  Yes.  It's twee.  Life is actually like that sometimes.  So I'll leave that in its twee-ness and move on to this morning.

One of my sacred rules of life is that I will always treat and tip well the person who serves me a drink, be it caffeinated or alcoholic.  (Obviously the same thing goes for waiters and anyone else in a service type of job - the rule in my head specifically refers to drink-related people as they're who I see most often.)  So maybe a month and a half ago, I had gone in on a Monday morning for my usual coffee run before heading off to tutor.  The barista, whom I'd never met before, was playing Bloc Party on the stereo.  I commented on it, she commented that she didn't know a lot of people who knew the band, we got into a discussion about music we liked to run to (Bloc Party being high on my list).  The next time she was working when I wandered in, we established that we're both in grad school (albeit different disciplines).  Since then we've been really chatty every time I've gone in that she's been working.

Anyway.  I was working in the Writing Center this morning, and she turned out to be my appointment for the first half hour.  The appointment ended up going an hour and a half.  It turns out she's ADHD as well and has a bunch of the same sorts of organizational difficulties I struggle with.  I ended up sharing every writing strategy I could think of as we worked through sections of her paper, things that have worked for me that might help her as well; we compared Adderall experiences, work habits and patterns.  The writing stuff is what interests me most:  I'm hoping I run into her soon so I can hear if anything that works for me also works for her.  That said, I'm going to throw the ideas out here in the hopes that, as they've helped me, maybe they'll help another ADHD-type brain.

Without further ado (and possibly to be reposted, later, with additions and without the huge run up):
- BRAINSTORM.  Start by mapping/webbing.  This is something that a lot of us (in the 80's, anyway) were trained to do in elementary school.  Take a piece of paper.  Write your main topic in the middle and draw a circle around it.  Then write one of the large supporting ideas that you'll be discussing somewhere else on the paper - say in the upper right corner.  Draw a slightly smaller circle around that.  Connect the circles.  As you have large supporting ideas, do the same with those.  Supporting ideas need support too, so as you come up with smaller supporting ideas, figure out which of the larger supporting ideas the smaller ones fit with, and place the smaller ideas in groupings around the larger ones.  If a smaller idea fits more than one of the larger ideas, connect it with more lines, etc.  What you'll end up with is a series of clusters that are linked together.  You can then transform the giant clusters into a workable outline, and write a paper from there.
              For an ADHD brain, the beauty of the mapping/webbing style of brainstorming is that it allows the flow of thoughts to come in random, scattered, oddly-connected ways rather than in linear ways.  I know lots of people who can think linearly, form linear arguments easily, who see things in very cause/effect-type ways.  Outlining tends to work well for them.  However, for those of us for whom linear thinking is difficult at best and an utterly foreign concept at worst, mapping allows space to write the thoughts wherever they seem to belong whenever they come up (so that there needs be no attempt to force thoughts to stay only on one of the supporting ideas at any given time), and allows, through drawing lines to connect the ideas, a way to "see" the connections more strongly. 
- When writing at a computer and stuck with writer's block, take out some paper and a pen (or crayon or pencil or whatever) and start writing by hand.  Write anything until you get going on a new idea.  N. Katherine Hayles  and Sherri Turkle (among others, but these are the two who come to mind right now) have both argued that the technology we work with affects the way we think.  I've found that, for me at least, this is very much true.  This means that I can, to a degree, manipulate how I think through the material I work with.  Through writing ideas out by hand, I'm forced to slow down significantly from the speed that I'm typing at - this seems to force my thoughts to slow down and settle a bit more than they do on the computer.  I wonder if there's more to it - if the way I'm working with my hands somehow changes my thinking, or if the fact that I can doodle in the margins when I'm using a pen - something that obviously doesn't happen with computers - somehow changes what my brain is doing.  I doodle a lot when I'm writing by hand.  Computers are great because they allow for thoughts to be recorded extremely quickly (and edited just as fast), but they don't allow for some of the right brain-type action that can come out when doodling.  Anyway, if you're at a computer and stuck, take out the pen.
- (This one more super-specifically for ADHD than for any other type of brain)  Plan on a rough draft that is roughly half the length of what you actually need to churn out.  One of the problems that I've seen with many ADHD writers is the tendency to skim along the surface of thinking rather than explain the depth of each thought.  Instructors get really frustrated with this (understandably, I think, coming from the side of the student who has turned in very "surface-y" work and from the instructor who has received it from her students).  The problem with ADHD writing isn't that the depth of thinking isn't there (though this is often what's perceived): the problem is that the depth of thinking often isn't explained fully (if at all).  When pressed on a point, the writer can nearly always explain layers upon layers of thought that went into the final point (the final point being the only part that actually made it into the paper).  When asked why all that thinking wasn't put into the paper as well, the answer is often that either the thought process itself didn't seem all that important or that the connections seemed so obvious to the writer that writer assumed everyone else would see them as well.
              This is why I suggest starting with a rough draft that is only half of the required length.  Once the main ideas have been spelled out, stop writing and start asking questions (or better yet, find someone else to ask the questions - writing is best as a group effort).  The goal is to resemble an eager, why-asking five-year-old as much as possible.  Five-year-olds, when asking "why" about ANYTHING, are inexhaustible: they're trying to understand everything as fully as they possibly can.  In adopting this tactic, the ultimate point is to make sure that the thinking behind every point, every conclusion, every sentence is explained as fully as possible.  (This is another reason why mapping is so helpful - it gives a diagram of the thoughts that went into each major point so that nothing is left out.)  Explain EVERYTHING, even the seemingly most unimportant points and digressions.  Then and only then, go back and edit out the truly extraneous sentences. 

That's the short version of paper writing for the ADHD brain.  Like I said, I'll probably repost and expand it later (like, say, when it's not 1am, I haven't been up since 7, am on more than 4 hours of sleep...) - I have no idea how clear any of that is at this point because I can't see straight for yawning.  But I'll work with it soon - I'm not the only person with ADHD who's found themselves needing to write a paper.  If this has worked for me, then it will work for someone else.

I'd try to come up with some bizarro way to link back to the beginning of this post, to bring it all full circle (again?), but it isn't happening naturally and I don't feel like forcing it.  This should be two posts, really.  However, I've typed it all out and I'm not changing it now.  Enjoy!
(Really, Pandora?  You're advertising CLUB MED to me in between songs? Heh.)