I have bipolar disorder, a neurodivergency associated both with creativity and with terrible mental health. Finding the sweet spot between high creative output and stability has been challenging, but I have found a variety of ways to manage my condition without sacrificing my unique voice.

Today, I’d like to share some of these in hopes that they will help you. Maybe they won’t; that’s okay. Neurodivergent people are, well, diverse. Take what you like and leave the rest. With that, I’ll get right to it.

Do not abandon your treatment plan in hopes of being more creative.

As I discussed in my article about the myth of the martyr-artist, getting treatment is not the end to your troubles. If you are bipolar or have another serious mental illness, there will likely come a day where you think to yourself, “Why am I taking these pills? I’m fine. Maybe my brain chemistry changed or my past mental health episode was some fluke.”

That is the devil talking. Tell it to shut up.

I get the urge, though. Many of us deal with a type of amnesia about our serious mental health episodes; they become blurry and we don’t really remember how bad they were. So we forget how important it is that we continue taking our medications.

On the other hand, others want to stop because they’re dealing with severe side effects. I totally get that; the antispsychotic Geodon caused allergic reactions that would lock my jaw open for up to six hours.

And yes, sometimes your psychiatric medication is the reason for your writer’s block. Wellbutrin turned me into an uncreative zombie and I eventually had to come off it because that was impacting my mental health. (I had been on it for over three years, so I did give it plenty of time to work.)

But the cure for that isn’t just throwing all your pills away and going medication-free. You need to go back to your psychiatrist and workshop solutions. I cycled through well over a dozen drugs before my psychiatrist and I landed on a winning combination; then, as I continued to improve, we tapered me down to just Lamictal for maintenance.

I’m in great mental health for someone with my condition and it’s because I was persistent in seeking the perfect treatment option. You can get there too, but you have to make treatment your primary objective until you’ve reached stability. Even if that requires taking some time away from writing so you can focus on self-care.

Understand that good mental health is a prerequisite to good creative progress.

Yes. I know. You have been told otherwise all your life by dramatic tales of famous authors who were suffering from severe mental health disorders.

But the thing is that these writers are outliers. Most mentally ill writers of those eras never achieved any level of success. They might have been institutionalized, put on heavy sedatives, lobotomized, or died by suicide before ever getting published.

Fortunately, we live in a world where we can get good treatment and live productive lives. The community model of mental health treatment means that most of us, even the most severely mentally ill, are encouraged to live in society, to work and build relationships. There are hundreds of different pharmaceuticals available, and one of them is almost certainly likely to provide you with great success.

Most importantly, the stigma of mental health has started to break down, especially for things like anxiety and depression. While people like me still face negative stereotypes about bipolar, most people I talk to nowadays do not have the same revulsion and fear about my condition as they used to.

Stop believing the fantasies of genius in suffering. Mental illness causes brain damage, and brain damage is the very last thing we associate with success.

If you can afford and access treatment, why wouldn’t you? It’s not just about your creative output, but also about keeping a job, paying your bills, building good interpersonal relationships, improving your physical health. When any one of those goes, so does your ability to focus on higher cognitive functions like writing.

You need to bring your very best self to the table when you write. And you deserve to be your very best self. So please maintain your treatment regimen.

Give yourself plenty of time to finish projects.

Many neurodivergent people rely on their stress responses to get things done because their brain has been trained to respond only to adrenaline. This can be a fine and handy tool for small, short-term projects.

Often, I’ll know that I have a minor task to do – getting something notarized, printing something out, making a phone call – and it just keeps slipping lower and lower on my to-do list until it vanishes because there’s no immediate need for it. I’d feel better if I did it, but something else always takes precedence. If an urgent situation makes it so I want to get that done, it’s great for me.

Writing a book does not look like this, though. A book is a large-scale, long-term project with a lot of moving parts. It’s not like doing laundry, which can take me up to five days to complete because things that are not in my immediate line of sight magically disappear to the netherworld.

Laundry only requires like five actions max. Writing a book requires thousands.

When neurodivergent people apply the adrenaline principle to book writing, they typically … never finish their projects. Why? Because that kick in the ass never comes. There is no urgency because they don’t have a deadline to publish.

My laundry situation gets urgent when I run out of clothes. There are no such physical cues – or weird stares – that come from not writing a book.

So some writers will create a deadline, and then they keep procrastinating, and then they’re panicking because they’ve told everyone that they’re going to release on a certain day, and then they’re up at 3 am frantically finishing their half-baked project that they only started on two weeks ago.

A writer’s worst disaster.

So, please do not rely on adrenaline to get your writing done. The best writing is thoughtful, measured, and polished. Anything you turn in using the adrenaline method will be rushed, unedited, and riddled with plot holes.

While we cannot magically wave our hands and make this issue go away, we can rectify it through scheduling.

Work ahead before you develop publishing plans.

I did this by writing the sixth and eighth books, Poesy and Perseity, first, as I originally intended to only have a trilogy. Then I went back and wrote most of the first four books before I published the very first book, 9 Years Yearning.

As such, I had solid first drafts of six books – 9 Years Yearning, Pride Before a Fall, Funeral of Hopes, What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, Poesy, and Perseity – before publishing anything. Given that the entire series is only ten books, that’s quite a head start.

This gave me plenty of cushion between each release so I wasn’t rushing to finish. I could take my time making each project the best it could be and still have time to relax, work on my blog, and deal with real-life stuff during that time. Doing this also meant I had the full span of the series in my head before I published anything. I knew what was going to happen, so I could carefully insert some foreshadowing without it seeming artificial.

I finished What Is Cannot Be Unwritten about two weeks before Funeral of Hopes published, which meant that I had nearly a year to work on the fifth book, Absent All Light. And because the sixth book was mostly done, I knew that I could get started on the seventh book almost as soon as I was done with the fifth one.

This makes me appear to be a very fast writer who can release two novels a year. But I’m not really that fast. I just did a lot of prep work.

If you are starting at the beginning of a series, get the first and second books done before you plan a release date, even if they are just drafts. Then you can begin working on the third book as soon as the first one is released and will have plenty of time to organize everything.

For the minituae of organizing a book, please check out my stages of writing post that explains, step-by-step, how to coordinate your writing project.

Of course, you might not like that approach, and that’s okay. You can modify it to meet your own needs as long as you have some accountability and cushion time baked in.

Don’t worry if your work flow looks unusual to other people.

Neurodivergent people usually fall into two camps. One is the “fuck ’em all, who cares if I look weird?” Given my bright green hair, it’s clear which camp I fall into.

But, there is also the other demographic: the “oh god, what if they think I’m crazy?” camp.

I understand that others are more sensitive to how people perceive them. Since writing is such an important part of your life, getting judged for how you perform feels terrible – like a personal attack.

There’s an exceptional quote for this, and one that can apply to many life circumstances: “don’t take criticism from people you’d never go to for advice.”

Non-writers do not fully understand what the writing process is and what it involves. They also may not understand the techniques we use to get ourselves into the right headspace, like listening to the same song dozens of times in a row or physically acting out scenes.

Even other writers, especially neurotypical ones, may not understand your process and will rush to judgment, telling you that you’re doing it wrong and what you should do instead.

Nothing I share on my blog is meant to say you are bound to my process. I often talk in absolutes, but I also try to add a caveat that I’m not the omniscient, all-knowing writer. My advice could be wrong, or not fit your approach, and that’s okay.

If what you are doing is working, then it absolutely does not matter what other people think. If it’s not working, then you can seek advice on how to do better. Help is out there, whether that’s my blog or some other resource.

There are many writing tools out there that I hate. I don’t like Scrivener; it’s so complicated and my brain starts to bluescreen when I look at it. But other people are aghast at how I do things, too.

I usually have a Google Doc for my outline, then make a second outline using the double outline method, and finally write in Microsoft Word (not Google Docs, because Word is easier to export to Kindle Create). I also take quick notes on Notepad and put comments in my documents to remind me of what to do next. And I make multiple drafts, with D1, D2, and so on.

To some people, this sounds nightmarishly confusing, but it works for me and I have no intention of changing my methodology. Once you’ve got a plan, then stick with it and don’t worry what others believe.

Sometimes, you might have to force yourself to stop working.

For many neurodivergent people, they become hyperfixated on their project and will work on it for hours, even until the sun comes up. Productivity is awesome, but it can lead to worse mental health outcomes if you’re sacrificing your sleep to make that happen.

This is especially true if you have a mood disorder like bipolar. Sleep is essential for bipolar patients, truly one of the most important things we can do for ourselves. Without sleep, we risk mania; in fact, that’s a hallmark warning of worsening mental health.

I’m not lecturing you, by the way. The bags under my eyes are stuffed to capacity, sitting in the same place they have since the Obama administration. I’m usually the last person in my household to fall asleep, stumbling around in the dark so I don’t disturb anyone.

Or, for some people, they can’t switch tasks when it’s time to do something else, so their life starts falling apart. These are both bad things, and we need to avoid them.

Thankfully, there are tools out there. One of the most powerful I have found costs you nothing extra.

Just unplug your laptop or computer. Set an alarm and force yourself to pull the plug at a certain time each night.

Logically, I know that my laptop keeps a charge for a few hours after I unplug it and I could keep working, but there’s something visceral about literally yanking the cord out of the wall that tells me I need to go to bed. Also, my floor lamp is plugged into the same outlet, so it also goes off with a dramatic flourish. Big theatrics.

Oh, and turn off your phone. Get a mechanical alarm clock if necessary. You’d be surprised how much just checking the time on your phone can disturb your sleep.

If you believe you can do it, you can.

Finally, people forget that we are who we think we are. Our primary limitations are often self-imposed.

For years, I thought I was an innately unathletic person. I had never done any sports, and most of my physical activity came from walking my dogs. But I decided to try out rock climbing, and now I work out at least three times a week minimum.

I’m not the most amazing rock climber ever: I top out at a 5.10+ after over a year of consistent practice. However, I did break the mental restriction that liking exercise is something you’re born with and can’t fix. In fact, I think everyone can find at least one physical activity they enjoy enough to do regularly; it just takes trial and error.

If you consistently tell yourself that you are undisciplined, unmotivated, uncreative … you’re right. You have told your brain, over and over again, that it can’t do something, so it will naturally avoid doing that thing so as not to prove you wrong.

Those with deeply held negative beliefs can benefit tremendously from therapy, especially EMDR. I know that not everyone can access therapy, but free tools are abundant in the modern age. There are even EMDR YouTube channels that provide you with bilateral stimulation videos, and you can read EMDR books to do some light work on your own. It will not be as helpful as guided therapy, but it is a good start.

Breaking down those mental barriers is crucial for long-term writing success, and it is definitely possible. Discipline, schedules, patience, and persistence will get you so much further, especially if you prioritize your mental health at all times.