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The Trouble With ADD or Stupid Brain

The Trouble With ADD or Stupid Brain

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The trouble with having a problem with your brain is you use your brain to notice when you have a problem. When it’s a problem with your brain it’s hard to notice there is a problem.

I was writing a story about a kid with ADD and decided to do some research. Because I wanted to portray the situation accurately I got an audiobook called Driven To Distraction. I constantly found myself distracted and having to rewind the audio to hear what was being seeing said.

“This sounds important,” I’d think. “I should rewind it and listen carefully.” I’d rewind the audio 30 seconds and press play. Before I knew it, I’d be gazing out the window, or waiting at a traffic light, or checking twitter, or whatever else, and realised I’d missed the important sounding information again. I couldn’t pay attention for 30 seconds.

I wondered if I had ADD. Luckily, I already had a book about it.

In Driven To Distraction there is a story of a woman reading a brain book and discovering her husband probably had ADD. “My wife has that book,” I thought. When I got home I asked her about it. “What’s the name of that brain book you have?”

“The female brain?”

“Yeah, is there a male version of that?” She said yes and I bought The Male Brain. I read the whole book cover to cover and loved it. It was really well-informed very enlightening. However, it doesn’t mention a single thing about ADD.

I decided I needed to check out some other Brain books and went to the library where I got Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. When I got home I showed it to my wife.

“I’ve got that book,” she said.

And then I knew that was the book mentioned in Driven To Distraction. At that point I realised I had ADD.

The Awkward Tourist

The Awkward Tourist

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Last summer I traveled across the US and spent a good amount of time on the East Coast. As a tourist I did all the obvious sightseeing, especially the historical places where the country’s founding fathers did their business. Places like Independence Square, the building where the declaration of independence was signed.

The trouble with visiting these places is, as an Englishman, most of the time they are telling stories about how much of a shit the British were being.

Independence Square, Philadelphia

 

While visiting  Independence Square I took part in group tour of the court-house where the US Senate and Congress originally met.

I had a question about what happened to the court-house once the Government moved to the newly built Washington DC. I raised my hand but someone else’s question was picked first.

“Are those the original paintings?” she asked, pointing at two large portraits hanging on the wall.

“They are not,” said the guide. “They are replicas. The originals were sent to The White House but were destroyed during the war of 1812 when The White House was burnt down by the British.”

The woman nodded content with her answer.

“Any other questions?” the tour guide asked.

I slowly lowered my hand.

Greener Grass

Greener Grass

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Unable to leave her family she avoided the white light. That was 50 years ago today. Having watched her husband move on she eventually witnessed her daughter and son’s departures. Left with a generation she’d never met in life, Hattie was no longer happy with her current company and decided to visit the neighbours.

Trey Parker’s Writing Tips

Trey Parker’s Writing Tips

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Most of my writing has been in the form of screenplays so when transitioning into novel-writing it’s difficult to gage what skills, tips and tricks transfer to the novel format. Usually the answer is: if it’s simple it works.

No advice I’ve seen has been as simple, and impressive, as Trey Parker’s “therefore” strategy.

Trey Parker & Matt Stone

In 2011 Parker and his writing partner Matt Stone did a guest lecture at N.Y.U where he explained how to tie a bunch of comedy beats together into a decent story.

The video is not embeddable so watch it here.

Parker said, “What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but’. What I’m saying is, you come up with an idea, like, this happens  and then this happens. No, no, no. It should be, this happens, and therefore, this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens.”

It’s simple advice that really gets to the heart of why a scene is happening, to set up a conflict or complication. It ensures a story is a chain of events where each scene causes the next scene or makes things harder for the character.

This advice has been public since 2011 but I forget it all the time. Now I’m putting it here for myself, and anyone else that wants it. As I write on Scrivener I use a scene template for each new story beat at the top of the scene I’ve included: “Therefore/But”. Hopefully that will keep this handy tip at the forefront of my mind when writing story beats.

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