Thoughts of a Mad Man

Writer discovers the cure for ADHD? ;-)

Non clickbait headline:


Writer recreates his ADHD in his readers; can the reverse work on him?


Just discovered: link between infodumps and ADHD


I've been editing an old piece of mine, one well plotted with a lot of deep, hard hitting themes and just massively terrible stuff for the young heroine to deal with. Orphaned a second time, plagued by survivor guilt to the point of running away from her new friends who practically adopted her, and conned into ambushing an innocent of the murderers' race and having to protect that boy, one could hardly say that there's nothing going on. The story was there, on the page. Yet that's not what my readers experienced, not most of them.


It wasn't until I looked at the actual text that I got a sense of what had happened. I had resisted the urge to talk about all the things that were going to happen, and all the things that were free associated to me. I stayed pretty well in the physical scene, but I did not stay in the cycle of cause and effect. So even though all the things I described were in the moment, and present, it seemed like they were a mix of fluff and infodumps. When refugee/orphan Sigrun was trying to get a ride away from the devastation of her farm home by pig-faced friends-of-the-family gone berserk, I was happily describing the size of the halfling's head and the shape of the elf's ears (since our heroine doesn't know those races) and the raving of one of the pig-faced ghosts. As a result, only a minority of my readers could really sift out the story.


So what gives?


One of my writer friends had read about how having a swarm of info dumps goes along with a loss of the cause and effect thread. Now this makes sense since if you can weave a fact into the cause and effect cycle it stops being an info dump by definition. The new part was my reflection that these info dumps make it harder for the reader to generate dopamine–that is, for them to pay attention. It creates an Attention Deficit in the reader, leading them to Hyperactively close your file, and that is definitely Disordered in your reader/writer relationship. (Virtual ADHD). The other new part was my excuse that I don't have a lot of cause-effect in my natural stream of consciousness. Everything my brain looks at is some kind of info dump. When there is a cause and effect, it's not the here and now kind, it's the backstory kind. Not, she's here at the register because the last customer got helped, it's because of the industrial revolution means that people are no longer self sufficient, and she hasn't learned to order her food online.


So I am reflecting that this could be the link. Your brain finds what it looks for, so if I look for immediate cause and effect relationships I am likely to find them. Would that stimulate dopamine, turning my everyday boring activities into well-edited page turners?


What do we do about that?


Well, there are roughly three sorts of hacks that spring to mind. From the easiest but most gimmicky to the more difficult but natural, they are: Priming the mind with notes and mantras that say, "Cause and effect" or just "because" is the easiest. Reflecting on what one sees and drilling down to immediate causes is another. And finally, simply maintaining an intention and monitoring the results whenever one does.


In sum, if you can put it into effect, then the weaving of cause and effect into one's thoughts could be lifechanging for the ADHD person. That said, this is an ingrained behavior. It might have some utility in the immediate but it would have to be practiced over and over before it could become a core competency.