Recently I was asked (as a facebook question) “What is your ideal writing environment?” and I responded thusly: “My ideal would be to sit here at home at a desk I already have set up and type away. My muse hates my desk. Lately the only place that I can write is at my desk at work which means stolen moments and a lot of incomprehensible prose.”
Actually I CAN write anywhere. Because I am ADD (but not ADHD) I used to find it pure torture to sit in a classroom and listen to a professor. In my later days of degree collecting I spent four years in a school where classes were given in the evening (very convenient for those of us who were working full time) and once a week. The latter meant that I would spend three hours a night in the same professor’s class and do this three times over each week.
As you can imagine, with ADD I should have been climbing up the walls. And I would have been if it had not been for the fact that I was ambidextrous. I would sit at my (smallish) student desk with two pads of yellow legal paper and two pens. With my left hand I would write novels. With my right hand I would take notes.
Now I’m not going to tell you I was so good as to be able to do those two tasks simultaneously, but I used up a lot of yellow legal pads.
Only one novel remains from those days. The rest of the stuff was unmitigated blather. BUT, I did find out that you can write anywhere and everywhere. I can sit down in a library, I can write waiting for my oil change, I can type reports at work and write novels split screen.
So when someone tells me that they have to be in complete silence and have all the stuff on their desks aligned I laugh. I tell them that they should become ADD.
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