Have you ever felt like you know exactly what you want to say, but have a hard time saying it? Or have you ever tried telling a story, but lose track of the point?
That’s what it feels like all the time for someone who is a scatterbrain, just like me. I have always had a hard time collecting my thoughts. I have countless memories of friends quickly losing interest in the stories I am telling and rambling even through my writing. Honestly, I saw people around me being able to deliver jokes perfectly and their writing telling stories that were so good they could be published, I felt left behind. It’s not like I had a lack of ideas but I just needed a way to present them better.
As any 15-year-old would do, I immediately started googling what I felt, my constant need to jump between tasks, my forgetful behavior, and my inability to structure my thoughts and the first thing I realized was that I’m not alone. Up until then I always thought it was weird I didn’t procrastinate like my friends, but I still seemed to get nothing done and there was the reason as to why. I and lots of other people have low attention spans. It’s honestly more normal than it seems with people hustling so hard to be successful and getting so much done.
Having a low attention span doesn’t make us not-productive or less efficient; it is just that it becomes very hard to focus on a task. This means that while we are writing not only do we feel the need to go finish the laundry, do some art or talk to a friend. It also means that within what we are writing our thoughts tend to jump all over the place. For me, this meant that my stories started with a sold beginning but the middle and end would become a constant mess. Around this time is when I started coming up with solutions for myself.
There were a few standard things that people had told me in the past for effective writing, things that I think everyone has heard; mind maps, multiple drafts, and extensive proofing. But over the years I have come to add in a few more steps of my own to make the process smoother so to speak. First of all, I taught myself that I will not be getting this right on the first try, rewriting sentences is not a crime, and having to rearrange paragraphs is not a bad thing.
I worked on my writing as a project rather than a piece. This meant making a summary for what I wanted to write before I wrote it so that I had a structure to what I wanted to say before I got it all jumbled up. Something else that worked for me for assignments and papers was letting my thoughts flow whenever I got stuck. While it felt like I was going against everything I had taught myself, it meant I would end up with a few great points that I could then place wherever required. Having things on paper for me and most scatterbrains’ makes the ideas make more sense. Finally, the one thing that taught me more than the rest was opening up my work to criticism. I often let my work stay sub-par because I didn’t want anyone to see what I wasn’t proud of myself, but people are surprisingly helpful on the path of growth and accepting that really changed things for me.
If I look back on my writing from the past, I see what most people see in their work as they mature growth. Alongside that though, I also see an ability to achieve things that I work towards. I was that kid in school that would have to explain themselves constantly because they couldn’t even get a question out straight and today I am making my career partly off of the fact that I have honed in on my copywriting skills. I still have many writing flaws, but this was how I overcame some of them. While this might sound clichéd but working hard does pay off and there is no better teacher than the practice itself.
Feel free to let us know in the comments below some things that you have overcome and let your stories hopefully inspire someone else as well to go that extra mile to achieve what they dream of.
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