Building on last week’s post,Writing with Post-concussion Syndrome, this could be a prequel or a sequel depending how you look at it. But here, I’ll get to the nuts and bolts of “organizing words good when it’s hard to think straight.”

This may or may not be helpful, as concussions affect everyone differently, but I think it’s pretty common to have a hard time with concentration and focus. It’s especially true with writing.

1. Keep it Simple, Silly

If your magnum opus is sitting on your desk calling your name, I hate to break it to you, but you might have to give it a break for a while. Unless you’re lucky, and I hope you are. Me, not so much. I had an incredibly difficult time juggling any kind of story that had more than one basic plot line. It was just too much to try to sort through and have to think about. It was painful, but I had to shelve my novel for over a year. In that time, at least, I powed out several short stories and even a couple short film scripts. I even wrote a couple of 1000-word nonfiction training articles, but it was probably more than I could handle at the time. Somehow I pulled it off.

2. Start with the Big Ideas and Work Inwards

To sit down and actually put one word after the other in a legible and pretty order is a lot harder than you would think after I head injury. For instance, I could think of the big ideas, but to then try to articulate it into the words to tell the story was almost impossible. I had to break it down into the overarching themes, then into bullet notes, then organize the bullet notes, and then piece it together word by word. It was a pain in the ass, to say the least, but come hell or high water, I was going to figure it out. I had to do something with my time.

Even after dissecting an idea in such a way, I wasn’t always able to write the actual story itself, but I could organize the ideas into a relatively decent outline…

3. Outlines are Your Friend

Yeah yeah, pantsing it has been romanticized to the brink, but when you can barely remember your home address, it’s good to have a cheat sheet. You know all those bullet notes I was just talking about? Well, that’s the skeleton of this outline.

I hope you’re luckier than I was, but I basically had to spell it out like I was leaving it for a future writer with no insider knowledge to have to put it together for me. It was made all the more fun with all of the “code breaking” involved in interpreting Dictation’s misinterpretations. (Say that three times fast.) But on the plus side, the year of not writing put a lot of things in perspective…

4. Take the Time it Takes, and Visualize to Pass Time

Pre-head injury, I knew I was dealing with a lot of revisions in my big project, but all that time away from actually writing gave me a lot of time to play it through in my head and actually work out a lot of the little kinks that I had either ignored, or overlooked altogether.

So, with all that time you spend laying around with your eyes closed, put yourself in your character shoes, and really sort it out. Every epiphany I had would get dictated into a Google doc to be sorted and integrated later. I would have given just about anything to actually write, but I struggled so much with organizing the language in general, I knew I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of even mimicking the quality of writing I had before, regardless of what that quality actually was.

Working on all of those little projects and short stories were kind of my storytelling physio to build myself back up again and be able to handle a project with the scope of my novel. And after about 14 months I was ready for that. I just needed a way to actually create a word document. (Enter the Freewrite.)

But the moral is if you push it, you’re not going to be writing at the quality you’re used to anyways, and chances are you’re going to overload your cognitive bandwidth. Been there done that! Not worth it.

So break it into baby steps and treat your writing like you would an injured limb. You’ll have to learn how to crawl before you can walk, and you’re going to need to be able to walk before you can run with your ideas. But with time, and a lot of patience and perseverance, you’ll be on your way again.

This turned out to be more autobiographical than instructional, but it hurts too much to edit, lol. Perhaps this is one of those examples of how I should have drafted it into an outline first… But that’s what the numbered headlines are for at least.