There have been many benefits to my decision to leave teaching. There are also many things about teaching that I miss. But there is one thing I have noticed, by not constantly thinking about planning lessons, reviewing lessons and wondering how I can add something new to the curriculum for my History department, my creativity has gone all over the place.
So I have attempted to explore the idea of writing stories. Some have even been published in different forms, something I am unbelievably proud of and still in disbelief. Being a person with ADHD, I find that I can have my ideas go far and wide, and often stray from one point. This is probably why I have multiple WIP stories at the same time.
The creative process has always intrigued me. Knowing authors who can sit down on a rigid timeframe and just write for a few hours in the morning, or in the evening. I am amazed. I sadly find the idea of sitting down at 9am to punch in to create the dialogue between The Captain and Kajuna while they discuss the changes currently happening in the city of Coombe with the threat of a Goblin invasion. Well some people can hold it in until their allotted time. I can’t.
But today I seem to have found a good thing to help move forward on something bigger than a short story. The humble whiteboard. It was something that I used everyday. Every revision lesson, or just a general lesson in the classroom, the whiteboard with a spider diagram united many of my classes by visualising their ideas.
The image from today’s point isn’t going to be ground breaking, I have tried to do something similar on OneNote that I use for all my writing. But it has never had the same impact that I would have expected. But using it, I almost feel that I have a potential story arc to build on today past the 5k word count and link what I have already written.
I just need to remember to step away from the computer to eat and sleep tonight when trying to merge, blend and create the bigger picture of ‘the novel’.
S J Lister. Author 