When Paulette Perhach was diagnosed with ADHD at 38, she'd already been published in the New York Times. She'd already built a writing practice. And she'd already spent decades convinced that her inability to sit down, focus, and just finish things was a personal failing — a character flaw she'd somehow have to willpower her way out of.
It wasn't. And yours isn't either.
ADHD writers face a specific set of challenges that standard writing advice was never designed to solve. The usual prescriptions assume a brain that responds to good intentions and a quiet room. Many ADHD writers know exactly what they want to write. Getting the work done is a different problem.
In this live webinar, Paulette shares what she's learned from her own diagnosis and from coaching hundreds of writers through the blocks that keep talented, driven people stuck. She'll walk through the systems that actually work for brains wired for novelty, urgency, and big ideas — not the ones that sound good in theory and fall apart by Tuesday. Writers leave with concrete tools for starting faster, sustaining focus, and building a self-compassionate but rigorous routine that holds up when your brain doesn't want to cooperate.
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Meet the instructor
Paulette Perhach
Paulette Perhach has been writing professionally for 20 years, with work published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, Elle, Slate, Cosmopolitan, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Hobart, among others. Two of her essays have each reached more than a million readers. She knows what it takes to get work out the door — and she knows how long the road between "I want to write" and "I wrote it" can be.
Her book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books, a Penguin Random House imprint, and named one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers. Her essays have been included in round-ups from the Aspen Institute, Fortune's Broadsheet, and Memoir Monday. In 2021, she contributed to the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19, which won a Washington State Book Award. Her essay "A Story of a Fuck Off Fund" is anthologized in The Future Is Feminist from Chronicle Books, alongside work by Roxane Gay, Mindy Kaling, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Audre Lorde.
Her most recent essay appears in Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 13.
She has been recognized with a Made at Hugo House fellowship, a Jack Straw fellowship, and a Best of the Net nomination. The Belladonna named her satire piece its most-read of 2024.
Her coaching program, The Finishing School for Writers, is a 12-month program for memoirists and creative nonfiction writers who are done waiting for the right moment and ready to do the work.
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