Writing Tips for Neurodivergent Authors

At The Novelry, we’re always seeking new ways to provide writing tips and advice for writers at every stage of their journey. Outside of our courses, coaching and community, we cover diverse topics, genres and age groups in articles from our writing coaches—published authors who share their unique knowledge and experience right here on this blog.

A lot of the writing tips you find online, however, are directed toward a singular audience: writers without any neurodivergence, or what we call ‘neurotypical.’ While there is a lot of value to be found in these tips, it’s important to highlight the experiences of neurodivergent writers, too.

Neurodivergence covers any neurological or mental condition that is considered ‘atypical.’ This includes, and is not limited to, ADHD, autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia.

A group of our neurodivergent coaches at The Novelry recently hosted a workshop for our neurodivergent writers, open to all. They shared what has worked for them and their individual writing styles over the years. As a result, our team has been thinking more about neurodivergence and how important it is to adapt your writing technique to suit your individual creative needs.

Writing advice is not one-size-fits-all; we all have unique challenges to face, and especially if you are neurodivergent, you may have realized that what works for neurotypical writers might not necessarily work for you.

5 Practical Tips For Writing a Book as a Neurodivergent Author

As if writing a book wasn’t hard enough, some of the standard writing rules aren’t as effective for us writers with neurodivergence. Many of us have spent years trying to appear neurotypical, working with neurotypical methods in education and struggling to understand how our brains work, struggling to make other people’s rules work for us.

In this article, The Novelry’s writing coaches Alice Kuipers, Katie Khan, Mahsuda Snaith and L.R. (‘El’) Lam share practical advice for neurodivergent writers to help you plan, write, and finish a book. Each tip can be implemented into your writing practice from today—so experiment, be kind to yourself, and see what you find most valuable for your unique writing style. 

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1. Figure out which tools work for you

At The Novelry, we use a phrase over and over: tools, not rules.

Neurodivergence looks different for every author, even those who share the same label and diagnosis, so there are no hard and fast rules that are universally applicable. Nonetheless, each of our four coaches has taken time to discover tools that are useful for them, simply discarding those that don’t work.

Literary and women’s fiction author Mahsuda Snaith took a long time to realize she had dyslexia, because she loved to read when she was younger. Everyone’s diagnosis and symptoms differ, but for Mahsuda, she’s a slow reader and finds recall difficult so she has to learn by rote. Very white pages make word soup for her. To navigate this, she uses blue light glasses to reduce glare and stop words moving everywhere—which helps when she’s working on a screen.

Someone with ADHD can have many thoughts that aren’t always logical and can be very emotion-based, and so Alice Kuipers, author of YA and memoir and diagnosed with ADHD, finds that writing can calm her busy mind. She says, ‘writing can help those of us with neurodivergence feel calmer and more able to navigate the world, even as our brains can make it difficult to start writing.’

Writing can help those of us with neurodivergence feel calmer and more able to navigate the world, even as our brains can make it difficult to start writing.
— Alice Kuipers

El Lam shared how hard it can be for them to get started. Often, El finds that it’s the showing up to the page that is the challenge, and this threatens to stall their progress. Emotional dysregulation makes it harder—making it exciting to start a new project but then plunging them into the doldrums. El uses going to a cafe to write as a coping mechanism because it builds a routine that works. Now, they go to a cafe at eight most mornings so they can write in a regular way, and that helps them continue to make progress on their brilliant science fiction and fantasy books.

Be patient with yourself, and know that this first piece of advice holds: take time to figure out which tools help you get to the page, and let go of advice that doesn’t suit your unique challenges.

2. Build in dopamine hits

When a novel goes well you really feel it, but when it gets difficult, it can be tough to endure the wait for the big payoff of finishing a draft.

Triggering dopamine bursts throughout a long project by planning tiny rewards is a fun way to approach this challenge. Katie Khan switches up her writing routine regularly so she doesn’t get bored, and she uses tech so that she can keep herself interested. Dabble has a timer that tells you how many words you’ve written in a certain amount of time (hello, reward-based dopamine!), and Scrivener or Plottr can be fun for writers to experiment with.

The shiny new idea of a shiny new project can be very alluring, especially for writers with ADHD. Learning to excite yourself within one project rather than managing the constant chaos of project switching is how to eventually get yourself to publishing your best book.

Alice has learned to make the book she’s working on exciting enough to sustain her interest by making the book itself exciting. She does this by digging deep into the story, and using that stimulation instead of skimming the surface. She says, ‘That doesn’t mean you can’t play with a new idea on a Friday night—a flirtation—but honor the commitment of a long manuscript by popping dopamine hits within it. I do this with writing bursts of ten minutes, or by putting in exciting moments of action and drama to keep me invested in the pages. Sometimes I change my font or fiddle with formatting as a way to trigger a dopamine hit.’ 

3. Watch for burnout

Overwhelm and perfectionism can be absolutely paralyzing for writers, and especially for us neurodivergent writers. Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) can knock a writer so far off track that it’s really hard to get back to the page—even a perceived negative comment becomes a mountain to climb.

As writers we want to show our work to someone, but for people with RSD, navigating the normal and real response of an editor who is trying to help you improve your work can stop you completely. The deliberate journey of recovering from rejection, knowing that in an early draft it needs to be messy and imperfect, is overwhelming. And exhausting.

Katie Khan says, ‘Feedback and rejection happen at every stage of the novel, they happen at every single stage of the writing journey, but that doesn’t mean that the novel is bad. There are many ways to tell a story, and it doesn’t mean you got it wrong the first time; it means you tried something and you just haven’t got it right yet. It’s getting you closer to your book.’

There are many ways to tell a story, and it doesn’t mean you got it wrong the first time; it means you tried something and you just haven’t got it right yet. It’s getting you closer to your book.
— Katie Khan

Masking as we go through our busy work days can also cause exhaustion, which makes finding the energy to come to the page overwhelming. Katie uses habit stacking to help with this, a technique that James Clear talks about in his book Atomic Habits. Layering a habit over a habit, like sitting down with a coffee and stacking on a new journaling habit—noting down what you want to write for the day—is a great way to break down the huge task of writing a novel.

Using a habit stacking technique to build a routine, and leaning into our Golden Hour process, helps our writers reduce perfectionism and exhaustion. It also means you’re less likely to become overwhelmed.

Use this technique to build in rest and recovery, too. Rest can be very difficult for neurodivergent authors, but showing up creatively requires rest and recovery, and without building these practices into our routines, we can end up burned out and unable to write at all.  

4. Know your limitations

One of our writers at The Novelry shared that she leaves our Golden Hour sessions after 45 minutes because that’s what works for her. Katie used to write during her 15-minute train journey; Mahsuda succeeds when she writes in 20-minute chunks. Working with your brain requires those of us with neurodivergence to learn limitations that other writers may not have.

We may want to finish a novel quickly, send it out to publishers, and get that reward, but our reality means that we’re still figuring out how to structure the first scene. So be patient with yourself. Investigate what you need to learn to get to the next step, and realize that writing a book is not a race to finish first—just a process that you need to trust.

Lots of creative people are neurodivergent; we’ve had to be creative to get around the problems of living in a world that doesn’t suit our brains. The world doesn’t fit our neurodiversity, so we’ve had to come up with creative solutions.
— Mahsuda Snaith

Fueling your writing by learning is a brilliant way to fill yourself up when you’re feeling depleted and unsure how to get to the next page. But when we’re faced with new writing techniques, we might not be able to take a class as quickly as others, or retain information as easily. Try to evaluate weekly how your writing and learning are going—did you try to do too many things in the week? What could you manage next week within your limitations?

5. Refresh your toolbox regularly

Many adults with neurodiversity have already found a lot of workarounds to navigate the world. One of the challenges for those of us with neurodivergence is that we need to check on the tools that we’re using when we’re writing a book, because what used to help get us to our book may suddenly stop working. Refreshing the tools in our writing toolbox can really help.    

Sometimes I think: this notebook will solve all of my problems.
— El Lam

Our coaches suggest these various tools that have worked for them:

• Passion Planner calendaring or To Do lists
• Medication, supplements and therapy
• Kindle reading screens and blue light glasses
• Extra proofreading time
• Deadlines and rewards
• Setting up your next call with a coach
• 20-minute work windows
• Prioritizing tasks
• reMarkable 2-brand tablets

As El jokes, ‘Sometimes I think: this notebook will solve all of my problems.’ And Katie and Alice agree that they’ve both stocked up on new notebooks, ever hopeful that there’s a shiny solution to the challenges that writing with neurodiversity presents. Instead, the solution is a careful reflection on the tools that are currently useful, putting aside those that no longer serve us.

Mahsuda says, ‘Lots of creative people are neurodivergent; we’ve had to be creative to get around the problems of living in a world that doesn’t suit our brains. The world doesn’t fit our neurodiversity, so we’ve had to come up with creative solutions.’ Every writer has to adjust in different ways to the added challenge neurodiversity adds to writing a book—but together, at The Novelry, we want to help you find what works for you to finish your novel or memoir and get it ready for publication.  

For one-on-one help writing your novel, join us on a creative writing course at The Novelry today. Sign up for courses, coaching and a community from the world’s top-rated writing school.

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