ADHD, Journalism, and the Nightmare of Finding Manna in the Desert

Guest Post by William Gray for Talking Writing


I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in third grade, when the only medicine available was Ritalin, taken twice a day, with a 30-minute activation delay. I still believe my preference for creation over editing stems from the ADHD test with a blue pencil—and no eraser. Who gives a third grader a pencil with no eraser on a timed test?

Little did my doctor know, he spawned my first habit as a writer. I am happier to find new stories than to edit existing ones—far happier. Don’t get me wrong, I accept and welcome criticism, copy-edits, and content clarification. But if an editor suggests one change in the lede or nutgraf, that gives me a new story idea. I cast off stories like hair clippings.

Hello, by the way. My name is William, and as far as professional writing goes, I am belly-button deep in Year Three, contemplating whether I’m an “innie” or an “outtie.” I’ve just completed a Master’s in Journalism at Harvard. So do I continue professional journalism with a healthy dose of ADHD, or do I give into the “dark side” and leverage my skills into public relations, social responsibility, and consulting?

Like most writers I am cursed with black-hole bookshelves. My personal literary tastes range from this blog, which I devour for its wit and charm to Colossus: Bletchley Park’s Greatest Secret. Oh, and Mika Brzezinski’s All Things at Once is under the pillow. I’ll ignore the stacks of science fiction and Robert Jordan.

I am fascinated by the process of writing, of getting somewhere, of the follow-through reporting and hard work. I want to know how it’s done. I want the 5 Step Process to Make Readers Read Your Writing. But there are only templates and submissions@thisjournal.com email addresses.

The media world has changed, certainly over the past decade. It’s changed since I entered j-school three years ago. What began as an uncertain career covering nonprofits, homelessness, and the small-store owners of Boston has blossomed into the William Gray Media Empire-TM. Whether ADHD is a good match for new media—perhaps even a dynamite match—remains to be seen.

My usual story process is the same as any other reporter’s. We read an article in the paper or see something strange. We engage in conversation and realize nobody has answered the question we’ve been thinking about for the past ten minutes. Writers see opportunity in every crumpled napkin and discarded Big Gulp on the sidewalk.

But then we veer off-course to the Empire-TM where my ADHD is king. I must know everything about the subject. When did it start? Why? What’s different? Why the name? What were days 1-30 like? If I didn’t hate dates, I would be an historian, and Doris Kearns Goodwin would be See Spot Run to my Encyclopedia Britannica.

As an example, I will provide a personal labor of love: The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, more fondly known as C-SPAN. Full-disclosure: I interned at C-SPAN for three months in the Summer of 2009.

C-SPAN was manna in the dessert for my ADHD. The network had me tracking coverage during the day, researching the history and health of senators and media personalities, and consistently updating graphics for live on-air publication. I was sated and happy. And it was long-form, so I had to breathe, take notes, and pay close attention.

I wrote my final 5,000-word project for Harvard on C-SPAN. That meant I read the only book that exists on the subject three times in the space of six months. I dug deep into the C-SPAN website—I went to the Wayback Machine and tracked the content and design change since its first recorded site. I found interviews of Steven Scully on Journalismjobs.com and dusted off copies of C-SPAN’s in-house graphic creation guidelines. I sat down with the CEO to ask the simplest of questions about Tip O’Neill and the political climate of Washington during the network’s conception. I still have copies of the employee documents, internship guidelines, and the C-SPAN badge that hangs on the wall behind my couch (I promise I’ll return it). I’ve watched enough of the C-SPAN Archives to justify canceling my cable bill.

There I was, with a network that pioneered the call-in program, with thirty years of material. Let’s not forget Booknotes by Brian Lamb, either, which is a reader and interviewer’s dream.

And it was torture.

I did not know where to begin or end. I left over 10,000 words of interviews in my binder. I wrote eight pieces and made half-a-dozen follow-up phone calls for details as small as the color of the original binders used by Susan Swain, Co-Chief Operating Officer, to track the daily shows. How does one write about a network whose job is to record the political process and individual personalities attached to it? Did I mention I wrote a “Ten Noteworthy Moments in C-SPAN’s History” piece? I won’t detail how long it took, but it has enough bullet points to satisfy the most ardent PowerPointer.

I began researching the network eight months before my internship, when I met the CEO and immediately scoured the Harvard COOP for his books. Then I began watching C-SPAN actively. Then I started tracking videos on the website.

Then I wrote and I wrote and I wrote—until my editor said, “You have to cut.”

In the end, that phrase is the moral of the story for an ADHD journalist. I have a hundred stories similar to this, varying in length and degree, with equal parts failure and success. No matter how much I research, how many interviews I record, how many yellow legal pads I have on my shelf, I will have to cut.

I will have to focus. I will have to revise. I will have to edit. As one of the few individuals who can give an accurate description of what each specific medication does to affect my ADHD, this all means one thing:

I have to ignore the voice inside my head and listen to the voices of my audience.

And this means you have to read and shout.


Editor’s Note: Only about a hundred words were cut from the original version of this piece. Yay, Bill!

The go-to media expert for his peers, William Gray is an aspiring media guru and social responsibility consultant. He currently writes and consults for JForward, a new quarterly journal for the social sciences with an inaugural issue planned before Summer 2010. He also enjoys his role as Media and PR Director for WECAN and loves using personal projects for writing and radio speaking opportunities. He will also tell you more about C-SPAN than you ever wanted to know.

Erasing Family Stories—and Reclaiming Them

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


I learned to erase stories at a young age.

This profoundly inhibited my writing, so much so that I didn't realize it until well past college and into adulthood. Then, in the late 1980s, I took a workshop with Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the indie fiction writer and poet, in which she urged us to write down a family story.

Every family has stories, she said in her tell-tale drawl, stories they tell for comfort, for fun, for explanation—even if it's the wrong explanation. Family stories are powerful, she said.

I nodded along. But I felt my arms locking around my body. A stone seemed to lodge in my throat. I could visualize the stone—egg-shaped, smooth, glittering, obsidian—but no story.

At the time, her collection Almost Everything, which includes "Back to Texas" about Bobbie Louise's childhood, seemed like an unsentimental gem to me. In "When I was little...," she writes:

"The bottom fell out of melons that year and made them not worth the picking. We would walk along the rows busting ripe melons and eating only the heart. It was a luxury that took some heroism; the sand was hot as a frying pan and we were bare-footed."

I remember Bobbie Louise exhorting us to delete all adverbs and adjectives. That wasn't hard for me to do. But stripping out the sloppy language left me with nothing like a melon's heart.

I had no tall tales to draw on, I realized, no stories about larger-than-life aunts or uncles or "favorite cousins." I didn't come from a Southern storytelling tradition. But worse, I came from a family with little motivation to remember.

Growing up with a mentally ill parent encouraged helpless watching. Our family creed was constant erasure of pain, of blame. For the budding writer I was, it undercut my ability to convey what I saw.

My mother used to tell me to lie about her affliction, especially on medical forms, because of the prejudice against the mentally ill. This became a received truth for me, an uncontested way of being. Meanwhile, she often abandoned her own advice, explaining her diagnosis to work acquaintances, hair-cutters, postal carriers, grocery-store checkers.

Now I see too well the problem with erasing the consequences of breakdowns and raging fits, of shifting the blame in euphemisms such as "your mother was sick." For a good story, you need protagonists, not helpless watchers. You need someone to admit what's wrong.

When children grow up with adults erasing and reworking the truth, those kids can rebel. They also freeze up.

I've done both, and I still imagine every line I write disappearing as soon as the pencil moves on, every word I type vanishing on the screen. I see a little girl hunkering at the bottom of a deep hole, only a circle of blue sky above.

I see teenage me scribbling in lined yellow notepads, drawing cartoons, some of sexy women with ballooning breasts, some of angels and fairies—and every one of these forbidden images erased as soon as I mark it down.

Bad things would happen in our family—even good things—but nobody ever talked about them. I grew up with no sense of shared narrative, no comforting beginnings, middles, and ends. For a girl who loved The Lord of the Rings and Sherlock Holmes and Mary Renault novels and the Greek myths, it was like being blindfolded. 

Then, I think, that's not true. We did talk about the time my mother trudged all the way up Mt. Lassen, as if she'd conquered Everest. We talked about our adventures driving across the Mojave desert late at night, eating pinion nuts at dawn in our over-heating Dodge. I think we must have.

Yet the tenuousness of my own memories disturbs me. I do remember, but few events of my childhood were converted into cherished stories we told over and over. Without that cherishing, memories become endangered, too.

For the longest time, pulling together stories or articles eluded me as a professional writer, no matter how much I knew about expository writing. I wrote poetry, but my impulse faltered there, too. Even in the most non-linear of forms, truth eventually needs to shine through.

It's not an accident that I toiled as an editor of other people's stories for years. For at least a decade, my husband and close friends knew I was doing the equivalent of yanking my own hair out—I need time to write! When will I ever have time to write?—trapped by my own tangle of frustrations.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins is not immune from erasing and reworking the truth of her life. She was once unhappily married to the poet Robert Creeley, and I remember her talking about her insomnia, her own depression. Perhaps reshaping stories is what all writers do. Yet mining our own lives does seem like the right place to start. You can't get to the poetic compression of Bobbie Louise's work, for example, without acknowledging what came before.

Here's how she autographed my copy of Almost Everything: "For Martha, with pleasure—keep it up—see you again! Bobbie Louise Hawkins, August 6, 1988." I haven't seen her since, but even the hint that I had something to share or "keep up" has propelled me forward. That workshop became a turning point.

Now I write down every passing idea in my writing notebooks, and they pile up year after year. Sometimes I read through a notebook cover to cover, especially when I'm on a long airplane ride by myself, when I have time to stare at the clouds, to allow that smooth obsidian egg its due.

My notebooks are rich in ideas, stories, anecdotes, mental life, but often I come across entries that I've completely forgotten. It's not just that I'm getting older; I was well schooled in how to forget. But I don't want to forget. Not ever again. I'm obsessed with the notion of writing it all down, of the words remaining solid and present.

Sometimes I worry I'll lose the notebooks, they'll burn in a house fire, they'll be stolen.

It still comes hard in my own family, telling stories with my young son. But I make sure that we talk about "the time you had to swallow that malaria pill and you kept spitting it out" or "the time you sprayed insect repellent in your eyes, and you screamed so loud we had to call Poison Control. We had to hold you close until you calmed down."

I know this pool of stories is the underground life of my family. For an adoptee like my son, having family stories to draw on, to claim, seems crucial for his evolving sense of self. We build identity through stories, through being allowed to speak—not by keeping our mouths shut.

In a 2004 monologue, which she performed at the Naropa Summer Writing Program in Boulder, Colorado, Bobbie Louise Hawkins talks about a "happy ending" ironically, poignantly, wisely:

"It's time to adore the mundane. The daily is your heart's desire. The mundane world must be our joy. The daily, be our darling. The commonplace, be our morning song. The usual, be our heaven. The common place, our morning star. The usual. Sit on the veranda, drink tea, watch ducks navigate the pond. It is summer. And you are living a very long, unfinished, Russian novel...."

Yes. Every family has their own version of War and Peace. Mine hovers somewhere between The Idiot and Nabokov's Pale Fire.

But I've learned to live with my guilt and shell-shock. I've learned "to adore the mundane," because I'm writing my own Russian novel.

Painting Over Mistakes on a Still-Wet Canvas

"Have You Forgotten Their Wet, Sleepy Fragrance?" by Erik Hansen

By Judith A. Ross for Talking Writing

There are no shortcuts to well-executed art – be it painting, writing, music, or photography. The artist must be well-grounded in and attentive to every step of the process.

In their book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, David Bayles and Ted Orlando write, “Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work.”

Knowing one’s craft and putting in the hours of work may not reap commercial benefits, but it can result in work that has both quality and depth. According to Bayles and Orlando:

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons that every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas.”

In an environment where new media provides numerous opportunities for experimentation and self-promotion, it is especially crucial that artists and writers be well steeped in the basics of their craft.

The ability to first recognize mistakes and then edit and correct one's own work will make the difference between experiments that take others to new and exciting places and ones that leave them mired waist-deep in muck.

Nowhere is this tension more clearly illustrated than in the new online literary magazine, Electric Literature (EL). Some of EL’s experiments are more successful than others.

For example, EL recently delivered to its readers a short story by Rick Moody over Twitter. While the piece may never have made it into traditional print, it wasn’t meant to.

Instead, Moody crafted a story that fit into the new context. Two people meet online and then the ensuing May-December romance is described from each of their perspectives through a series of 140-character tweets sent out every ten minutes over three days.

While the format was difficult to follow, I continued to think about the story long after the final tweet. As one reviewer noted, these two could have been real people sending messages about a real encounter to anyone willing to read them.

Moody didn’t just dash this off, it was a carefully calculated experiment. In an interview with PBS Newshour, he explains how the story took shape, noting that it took as long to write as a traditional short story.

The EL blog, on the other hand, seems to feature writers who are trying to improvise complicated jazz riffs before they can successfully play a basic scale. These folks don’t yet know how to self-edit the way that Moody does. And this is where some outside editorial advice and shaping would help the writers and their readers.

The title of one blogged story, “Jeffrey, Vincent, Jeffrey and Vincent’s Father and the Woman in the Photograph” is a preview of run-on sentences and dense paragraphs that suffocate rather than enliven. The liberal use of the four-letter word for excrement was another turn-off.

This isn’t literature, electric or otherwise, but rather the kind of self-conscious, stream-of-conscious, navel-gazing more appropriate for a personal blog rather than an online magazine.

Other parts of EL’s site also strike me as work that should have been painted over while the canvas was still wet – starting with the artwork on the homepage.

Judgments about art and literature are subjective, of course. Even so, the more you develop your “chops” in any particular discipline, the better your work will be. Take the photograph now posted on this site.


Erik Hansen has been a commercial photographer for many years. Everything he learned during those years informs his art – as does his knowledge of history, politics, film, literature, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I happened to be in his studio when he was developing the image at the top of this post. He builds a model and then with lighting and other techniques brings the small-scale scene to life. He does not digitally manipulate his images: The magic happens before he clicks the shutter.

There may have been one or two happy accidents in making this image, but only a skilled photographer would be able to create and then capture the elements that make it so evocative – such as the funnels of light, the shine on the water, and the textures of the land on either side.

And that’s just the technical portion of his work. The ideas behind his photographs inspire viewers to superimpose their own stories over these imaginary landscapes.

That intent wrapped up in photographic expertise is what transforms this shot into a work of art. Erik not only enjoys every step of his process, he has practiced each one many, many times. As a result, he can make images that soar.