Two things came together in the making of this post.

Three, if you want to account for the lateness, which comes from my having been really sick, and this being the first night I didn’t cough enough to wake myself every hour, which means I must be better. And also why I slept till well past eleven. Sorry.

The other two things were that I was talking to the younger pickle (DIL, okay? We have a weird sense of humor in this family) and she told me she has ideas for stories, and wishes she could write them, but the rest of the story never appears, just the idea.

And there was a late night chat about who you really are and the integration of physical and mental impulses that makes you.

To explain, particularly if you’re ADHD, but really, if you are human, your personality, your core, who you “Are” is not as well integrated as you might imagine. The book recommended was Other Minds: The Octopus And The Sea. I bought it just before we moved, which means I haven’t read it, and have no idea which box it is in… (Sigh.) So I haven’t read it yet, and what I say will be based on the discussion a couple of nights ago.

The easiest way to put this is that you do a lot of things — both physical and mental — by rote and by trained impulse. Of course, this is a high evolutionary advantage for us. It can also be a pain when the wheels come off because there’s a brain defect or you’re very tired.

For instance, a year and change ago I was terrified I’d poisoned my cat, Indy, then 8 months old and under 7lbs, because I gave him the high blood pressure of my cat Havelock, then 15 lbs.

Now this might be excusable and make sense in some circumstances, but it made zero for these two cats. You see, Havelock is very fuzzy, mostly white with grey saddle and cap. And was at the time very large (he’s elderly and has lost a lot of weight in this time.) Indy is short haired, orange and at the time relatively small. (He’s now a large chonk.)

HOWEVER I hadn’t slept well after several nights of not sleeping well, and I was recovering from a severe URI. So I was almost functioning entirely on trained impulse. I was trying to catch Havey to give him his pill, and Indy RAN in front of me. My brain apparently went “cat, running. Grab. Give pill.”

Turned out at that dosage it wasn’t a danger to Indy. But the incident scared the living daylights out of me, because I have an innate fear of dementia, having seen mom’s mom go that way. The subsequent discussion was much like the one a few days ago in the group: Not dementia, but being sleep deprived and out of it enough that the “impulses” were in control. Or the back brain pattern recognition, if you prefer.

Like this: Sarah tired enough to be meat-robot. Cat is running as he always does when I get the pill. Cat runs in front (because kitten and an idiot.) Brain goes “Cat. Pill.” And executes routine.

This is of course bad, and why real dementia patients, or anyone with brain injury, do things like water the cat and give milk to the plant.

In my defense, ADHD is its own brain impairment, so I’ve been doing these things my whole life. I think I told here the story of how, in my mid thirties, I was ready to go shopping. Just before going out, I thought “Oh, I should take the chicken out to defrost. So I can cook when I come back.”

So, I thought, I took out the chicken, wrangled the two kids, then 3 and 7, put my purse under my arm, grabbed each child by the hand. Closed the front door (fortunately I always keep house keys in my pocket after one too many times of locking myself out) went across the yard, down the steps (we lived in Manitou Springs. 17 steps down to street level), across the street to where I parked by car, and reached in the purse to get the car keys.

Only I didn’t, because what I actually had under my arm was a frozen chicken. Yes, my kids laughed madly when I figured this out. They’d been expectant of this moment, the little SOBs (shut up. I know their mom.) I went back in and found I’d put my purse in the freezer. Because I had my purse under my arm when I opened the freezer door and was dealing with kids and shopping list, so I went on automatic. “Exchange these two things.”

So what does this have to do with writing? Or normal people?

Apparently everyone works like that every time. Our back brain is continuously evaluating sub-routines for activation and discarding what doesn’t fit. ALL the time.

Part of Jordan Peterson’s schtick — and to be fair, most clinical psychologists, at least good ones — is training people into creating functional and hopefully healthy sub-routines, so they don’t have to decide to do the right thing from scratch all the time. Same thing with say dieticians and such.

So you train something and reward yourself, often starting with small habits.

The thing is — returning to discussion with younger pickle — this works for mental tasks too, including quite complex ones.

Training yourself to make an idea into a story involves training yourself intoa series of questions.

-who does this change/thing most affect (individual who could/should be main character.)

-what problems would the change/thing cause?

– How does main character overcome problems/learn/improve situation through working through this?

That’s about it, but it will be really hard at first, and you will fail a bunch of times.

Something that makes it easier is internalizing what a story is. Reading Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer a few times helps. It sort of tells your back brain what a STORY is. And what structure to aim for.

Then one day it will click, and you won’t have the idea as such. You have the whole story. And then suddenly you’ll start generating stories out of the blue and in such a way they seem to reproduce like bunnies. (Hence plot bunnies.)

This is not magic, but training your brain to execute sub-routine “think up story.”

Of course, there are two things I should warn you of:

Once you train it you can’t untrain it. And the dang thing becomes pretty much automatic, attacking you at the oddest times, particularly when you’re tired and not paying attention.

Manageable -ish when you’re attacked mostly by short stories. A big problem when you’re a natural born series writer and your brain suddenly dumps a world and a six book series on you while you’re taking a tea break during a busy day, or walking three blocks to your art class.

The other caveat is that there is a further step in training. Training to subconsciously select for stories YOU personally can write.

Because a lot of the stories you’ll initially get are stories you can’t write.

Um…. what do I mean by stories you can’t write? I don’t mean skill. That has some say, but it changes with time and practice. I mean personality. There will always be some stories that aren’t yours to write, even if you can — and do — have the ideas, because they either don’t interest you enough; they’re in a genre you haven’t read in and don’t like, or frankly you just don’t want to and can’t make yourself do it.

I’ve told here of the time I really needed money and got handed a commission writing a book for hire. And couldn’t do it.

Why couldn’t I do it? Well, frankly because it was a “in the corridors of power” thriller set in Washington DC. I don’t even read many of them (though I’ve read some when out of everything else I could read) and there’s no way I could stay interested long enough to do a creditable job. My solution to power fights in DC is “Kill it with fire” and “make them all lose” which doesn’t make for a good story.

Same with my early attempts to write romances because it was easier to break into romance. I’d never read a romance, and I needed something else in the plot. Something that INTERESTED me. So on chapter 5 half the would be love interests reveal themselves as giant spiders from space and eat everyone else. The end. Not a very good story.

Anyway, training yourself to know which stories are yours requires writing a lot. Because you can be all excited for a story, and yet it’s not yours to write.

Even when you have a lot of practice it’s not flawless. You’re just likely to come up with something that plain isn’t yours.

Now is any of this easy? No. Like most training it takes time, effort and some amount of stubborn determination.

But it will make your life easier — much easier — once you do it.

So, give it a try.