Learning disabled writing advice.

However long it took to write, WittyName, it reads fine and if you hadn't mentioned it, disability of any sort would never have crossed my mind.

Speed isn't the important thing in writing. It's clarity and quality.

Many folk take years to write a novel. I've been working on mine now for some sixteen years or so. Jeepers- is it that long?

I don't know what you mean by 'difficult' but I guess it's somehow tiring mentally or physically or both.

I honestly can't give you any advice re the disability aspect although others may be able to do so.

But I do bid you welcome, and hope you find a way to achieve the writing of the story.

First thing you can do is to write it down, no matter how bad it may seem to you. It's your story, and only you can best put the picture in your mind into the pages. After you have written the whole thing down, no matter how incoherent it may seem, they would be your building blocks. You can then work to make the story better at your own pace. After all, if you begin at the lowest point, you can only go higher from that.

Lots of ways to skin a cat. My disability makes it hard for me to use my eyes many times, and so at times, I write using a screen reader. Most of my first drafts are done by screen reader. Another person I know has hand pain and uses a speech to text program (sort of the opposite.)

If the nature of your disability is that reading and translating words into visual text is difficult, would a speech to text program be helpful?

Getting a ghostwriter is always an option. But then I know for me, much of the fun is in the "doing" of it. You could also write our your story, and then get an editor to help you improve places that needed better clarity.

Also, perhaps trying a small project to start out with.

WittyName said:

I have a learning disability that makes reading and writing very difficult.

My question for you is, I have a story I want to tell and I don't know how to share it with people. I could write it down as an incoherent mess, with rambling non ending sentences and confusing repetitive wording... I fall for every common pitfall, and its unpleasant to read. Do I look for a writing partner to help with the writing part and I would provide story assistance or should I do something like hire a ghost writer? I have a story to tell, with storyboards and outlines of what the overarching story is. Just no way to share it....

please anyone wanna give me some advice on what I should do?

(P.s. This took around 20 minutes to write)

Click to expand...

Hi --

I don't know anything about your disability, obviously, but if it's possible practice would make it easier/faster, that could be a way to go. As others have mentioned, plenty of people take years to write a single book, for a whole slew of reasons.

If you're set on not being able to write it yourself, your option is a ghost writer, yeah. There is no one who will do the writing while you provide the idea, sorry. Every writer in the known universe has heard a version of that 1,000 times (from people saying they have a great idea to people saying they know someone whose life story would make a great book). They all suggest the writer do the writing part and they'll tell the writer the story/idea, and they'll split the theoretical money (again for a slew of reasons, from they don't have the time to they don't know about books to whatever. I'm not suggesting you're asking someone to just do work for you, but people do ask a version of this quite often.).

WittyName-

Hi. You made perfect sense in your post, even if it took a lengthy time to compose.

Here's my opinion. If you're young and not otherwise in a rush, don't worry about how long it will take you and do it yourself. As others here have said, you're the one who knows what you want to say. It's too easy for someone else to misinterpret, misunderstand, or take your ideas in the wrong direction. Then, once you yourself write a draft, find a good professional to help edit it.

Good luck.

As someone who suffers from a language learning disability, I totally sympathize with you. It's taken me 44 years to get to the point where I feel fairly confident in my grammar and punctuation, and still, it's a process.

I agree that a speech to text program might be a great way for you to go. Shoot, these days you can have one computer program write the text out for you AND get another program that reads it back! A lot of us with reading / writing problems still speak using proper grammar, and even know what sounds right when we hear it, so these programs can make writing so much easier and more enjoyable.

Once you have your book to the point where you have a draft you're happy with, you can hire an editor to help you work through the rest. You may also find this to be a great way to improve your writing. Having someone sit with you and explain what you're doing wrong (and right) in your writing is sooooo helpful! It's made a huge difference for me!

Hiring a ghost writer is an option, but unless you're willing to pay top dollar for a professional, you probably aren't going to be happy with the results. Better to spend that money on a good editor IMHO.

Good luck!

I agree with everyone above, and I want to reassure you that even without a learning disability, most first drafts are a hot mess and need a lot of work! I would encourage you to get your story down. Whether you list bullet points of items you want to include, or outline, or just start writing, my advice would be to get it on paper somehow. You can always fix and polish and reorganize later, and you can always get help to do that.

Your post was fine, you communicated perfectly.

I guess my only caveat would be to make sure you're performing enough self-care while you write. Try not to get frustrated when the process is long and hard --- which it is for all of us at many points.

Best of luck to you!

I was in the same boat 10 years ago. This is what I’ve learnt, it might help…it might not.

Get your learn on about your disability. Understand what it makes difficult for you, so you can strategise around specific things. This is metacognition (thinking about thinking). I had some one-to-one training/tutoring on this at work which was so helpful. You take a task and break it down into steps, figure out which ones are hard for you. Then you figure out why—what about it is hard—and find ways to make it less hard. When you know specifically what’s hard (spelling, or organising ideas) you can go looking for things that can really help, and it won’t always be things designed for disabilities. Sometimes it’s a change to how you work, or getting a person to support you. Sometimes it’s technology. Sometimes it’s a little of everything. It won’t always work first time, you need to play around until you find the way that works for you.

Most disabilities aren’t black-and-white. Don’t feel like you’re “doing it wrong” if your interests or talents are outside the cultural narrative of your disability. There’s a ton of ignorance and over-simplification when it comes to things like dyslexia (like, it’s just a “reading” disability, or it’s only about spelling…). Worry less about the label and find the tools that work for you. You don’t have to be a superhero and do everything, either. Play to your strengths and delegate the rest if you need to.

Find positive role models. Don’t let yourself feel like you can’t be a writer, or can’t be a real writer. You’re not alone. Seeing your experience in other people is the most encouraging thing, I’ve found. I particularly like Philip Schultz book My Dyslexia because he does such a good job capturing the outsider experience. And Rick Lavoie’s FAT City workshop…seeing otherwise-competent adults struggling like I do was the most empowering thing

Writing is hard. Most of the hard is over and above your disability, so don’t beat yourself up ;-)

Here are some things you might find useful:

LiveScribe—this is a pen that records audio, but with magic. When you point the pen at something you wrote/drew, it cues up the audio that was recorded at that time. The power in this is you can create a visual map through the audio content by making very brief notes (and they don’t have to be words, you can draw pictures). Great for people who struggle to listen and write at the same time. It’s meant for note-taking, but I think you can use it to sketch out your story and capture your ideas by talking…and then organise it later. You’ll be able to find the ideas visually within the audio instead of getting lost in the text/listening.

Scrivener—this is an absolute god-send for anyone trying to organise a complicated document. It’s not a disability product so it’s cheap as chips, but it’s just so good at supporting working memory and organisation. The magic of it is allowing you to work on the same content with index cards, outline, and the words—all in parallel and interchangeably. So you can always see where you are, you can throw all the words down and then cut it up and re-arrange it later. And you can work with icons and colours and tags to help you visually. It is a little overwhelming at first, but the tutorials are really good. I spent the first 3 months using it like Word while I got the hang of how I could use it to help. It works really well with a screen-reader and dictation, too.

Text-to-speech—if you have a Mac or iPad Siri is magic. You can set it up to read selected text or everything (so blind people can use a touch-screen), or something in between. I use VoiceOver to read content to me: e-mails, webpages, documents, Kindle books… there are plenty of screen-readers to choose from. Word has a built-in reader under Learning Tools. Buying an iPhone to read Kindle books to me was the single best thing I ever did, suddenly I had access to all the books I’d never been able to read (not everything is available as an audio book)…which is a lot of how-to-write education.

Speech-to-text—Dragon is the thing that lets you talk and it turn that into words on the page. It’s built in to Apple products, a separate bit of software for Windows. You speak, it writes. If spelling or typing are really hard, this can be a god-send, and it does work really really well…but it’s not perfect. It works best when you speak in sentences, it’s pretty terrible at single-words. I find the lag between speaking and the words appearing is…difficult. Enough I can’t maintain my train of thought. And you have to watch for when it mishears you (so many things sound the same to a computer but a person knows one is clearly wrong from context). If spelling/typing is an obstacle it’s likely much more useful to you, if finding the word you want is hard, it's probably not.

The Snowflake Method—Think of it like a satnav for your story. Once you’ve got the destination and route selected, you can concentrate on driving and let the satnav tell you when to turn so you don’t get lost. The key is how it's all a fractal: the tools you use to plan the whole story are the same tools to plan an act, scene, chapter, paragraph, or sentence. You just keep going down into the detail until the thing is written.

A visual guide to writing—this is a really good guide to getting your point across. You can apply the same ideas to non-fiction too.

June Casagrande’s books—if you have trouble at the style, grammar, and punctuation levels, these books are just marvellous.

Where to find support—this is the place to go in the UK to find specialist tutors who support/tutor adults with specific learning disabilities.

Hope this helps?