As a child, I was instructed to use my imagination. Then I was told I’m nothing but a dreamer. What’s the difference?
My heroes were fictitious characters from the pages of literature, novels and classics who seldom bothered with dishes or litter boxes, never seemed to bruise or succumb to the flu. Noses never itched, hangnails and Band-Aids never interfered with their momentum.
I learned to want that artificially perfect life. And I narrated my life as I moved through it, wondering periodically which volumn I might be living at the moment, while critically thinking that nobody would be interested in reading such a mundane existence anyway. Biographies required no imagination, in my childish mind.
Probably the only act I ever accomplished was finishing books. Scores of projects begun, hobbies taken up then abandoned, courses and careers embarked upon only to end up “Incomplete” marked my fleeting interest in almost everything in life, while TV played well to my abbreviated attention span by introducing, then solving, various issues, problems and dilemmas in 30-minute segments. Life was a smorgasbord, but I didn’t care to sample everything, just wanted to fill my plate with two or three favorites - horses, books and coffee.
Do I broaden my scope of interests? Or do I focus on The Dream? Is it ADD? If I cannot keep my shoulder to the wheel, do I risk The Dream slipping through my grasp?
Kirsten Lamb addresses distraction in her post “10 Ways for ADD Authors to Be OOH! SQUIRREL!!!! …Productive.” Forget perfection, she advises. Freed from first place, I can focus on getting it out of the cranium and onto the page, making mistakes as a process of refining a recipe. Adjust ingredients to suit your taste.