Writing with ADHD
The Itch I Can’t Stop Scratching
There’s a thing that happens, late at night, when I should be working on a synopsis or a chapter and instead I’m three hours deep into a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the construction of the circular harbor at Carthage. My ADHD-brain is grinning like a fool. My writerly conscience is appalled and embarrassed. I mean, what if someone finds out I spent precious work-time faffing about with ancient Carthage or searching the root-forms of popular Punic names? What if my wife finds out?!
This is, more or less, my existence as a writer of ancient historicals.
The question I’ve been asked (more times than I can count), and which was made manifest in the poll from the last post, is why do I not go back to writing sword-and-sorcery? Why? WHY? My authorial voice is as close to that of REH as any writer working today. Think of the glorious worlds you could write! The pay is more immediate (being a largely short-story economy); there are editors who have expressed interest in acquiring your work, and the readership is passionate and vocal. The research load is lighter because you can just make things up and nobody fact-checks whether the Hyborian Age had adequate grain storage. Why, God, why?
Look, I’ve written S&S. I love reading most S&S. But when it comes to what actually grips me, what makes my particular brand of misfiring synapses light up like Tyre under siege, it’s the ancient world. Greece. Egypt. The Near East. The centuries before the Common Era, when the stakes were mythic and the record is just thin enough to leave room for a writer to breathe.
And here is where ADHD and ancient history form a genuinely unholy alliance.
See, S&S is a clean genre. You’ve got your barbarian, your sorcerer, your doomed city. The conventions are known and loved. There’s a road map. For a neurotypical writer, that road map is a gift. For a brain like mine, a road map is an invitation to go off-road, and then the wheels come off, and then you’re lost in a marsh writing a story about the guy who was supposed to be a minor character in chapter two. I know because I’ve done it. More than once. With enthusiasm.
Ancient historical fiction doesn’t have those guardrails, but it has something better: weight. The research itself becomes the structure my ADHD brain desperately needs. When I’m writing about Baibars, or Darius, or the men who held the line at Pelusium against the Persians in 525 BC, I’m not free-floating in invented air. I’m anchored. There are inscriptions, papyri, fragmentary chronicles in languages that take years to master. There are gaps, yes, but the gaps are shaped like real human lives, and filling them in is a puzzle that my brain, for once, won’t abandon. Hyperfocus kicks in. Hours vanish. The ancient world and my neurodivergent obsessiveness are, it turns out, made for each other.
This is not to say it’s easy. Gods, no. It’s the opposite of easy. I spent weeks, last year, in a low-grade argument with myself over whether Baibars’s enslavement happened in 1236 or 1242. Six years’ difference, and it matters, because the age of the man at crucial moments is the beating heart of the story I was trying to tell. S&S wouldn’t blink at this. S&S would say: make something up, it’s fine, the Pictish Chronicles are fictional anyway. But I can’t make it up carelessly. Something in me refuses. The same itch that sends me down those Wikipedia holes at midnight is the thing that keeps me honest to the record when I’m drafting.
There’s a knock against ancient historicals that I’ve heard more than once from writers I respect: the audience is small. The research burden is enormous. The modern reader has no emotional shorthand for Achaemenid Persia the way they do for, say, dragons. I’m not dismissing that critique. It’s largely true. But I’d push back on the emotional shorthand part. The ancient world is full of emotional shorthand, provided you’ve done the reading. Alexander at Gaugamela. Memnon of Rhodes, the only man who came close to stopping Alexander cold, dying of infection before he could see his strategy play out. Baibars, a Kipchak slave who would become Sultan of Egypt and drive the Crusaders into the sea. These are not obscure tragedies. They are the tragedies. The ones that fueled early S&S. The ones that echo. Give a reader the skeleton of that context and they’ll supply the muscle and sinew themselves, because these are fundamentally human stories and human beings recognize them.
What S&S does brilliantly, and what I love it for, is distillation. Howard took the ancient world, stripped it of its scholarly apparatus, poured it through the alembic of his imagination, and gave us Conan. The essence without the bones. I’m in awe of that. I am constitutionally unable to do it. My brain won’t let me strip the bones out; it wants to catalog them, identify them, argue about their dating. That’s just who I am. So I write historical fiction and I leave the conjuring of invented barbarian ages to those more talented in that particular art.
The ancient world gives me something else, too, and this one's harder to articulate. There's a loneliness to it — the particular loneliness of being at a party where everyone else is deep in conversation about shows, music, the gossip of the day, and you're standing there wondering if anyone wants to hear about the administrative geography of late Achaemenid Persia (they don't; they never do). Writing becomes the outlet for that. The page doesn't want to change the subject; it doesn't want to chew its arm off when you bring up Mamluk military structure for the third time. The connection forged between writer and reader is absolute gold. Because you know that when they discover your work, read it, and get you . . . they really get you.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve got this all figured out. I have books to finish and a brain that would rather tell me about the engineering marvel that was Carthage’s double harbor1. But I know this: when I sit down to write about the ancient world, something in me gets very focused and very certain. The squirrels stop fighting. The noise drops. Whatever it is that passes for instinct in my particular neurological carnival points at the Nile, or the Aegean, or the steppes north of the Black Sea, and says: there. That’s the one.2
I’ll follow it as long as it runs.
“Carthage, again? You’ve been bitten by another idea, haven’t you?” Maaaaybe . . .
Granted, next week they’ll look at the other one and say: “No, that’s the one!” Such is life with ADHD-brain and no meds.
Scott...I think you could have the best of both worlds by looking at how Guy Gavriel Kay made himself so successful--by writing medieval and Byzantine history or legend veiled as fantasy. He hasn't had more true fantasy than most magical realism than a lot of contemporary lit since TIGANA; but in turning Byzantium into Serantium, in telling the story of the Cid as a love triangle in a Spain that isn't quite 11th century Spain, he's reached a larger audience, can freely do the sort of historical liberties you are already stuck with Darius or Baibars, and gets paid much better.
Needed to read this today! (Thanks for your Renault post a while back, too. I started my Renault journey with the Last of the Wine and I'm absolutely tearing through it.)