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The Wall-of-Text Page He Couldn’t Get Past

The Story

Before writing his own book, Jesse had bounced off other ADHD books and could point to the exact moment one of them lost him. “There’s a lot of like ADHD books that are very dense. I remember there was one that’s pretty popular and I was trying to read it and I got not that far into it. And there was like a single page where one paragraph filled the entire page and spread onto the pages next to it. And I tried to read that page so many times and I just couldn’t, you know, I just found myself bouncing back up and I never got past that page. That just like ginormous paragraph that was just like a wall that I couldn’t get past.” (Source 1).

That experience became a design constraint for his own book. “Very, very intentionally when I was writing my book, I was like, I know not all people with ADHD are going to be able to read this, which is why I’m going to, you know, eventually do an audiobook too. But I wanted to make this as ADHD friendly as possible, which is why I hired an illustrator. So there’s a lot of illustrations in it. And I very much intentionally designed like the text where like paragraphs are short, like usually not more than a few sentences and there’s space between the paragraphs. So it’s like it’s very visually kind of easy to read and not get lost in those like walls of text, which is all too common, I find.” (Source 1).

His interviewer William Curb confirmed the result from a reader’s perspective: “I really appreciated with your book, I’m like, this is really relatable and easy to get through. Like I’m not, I didn’t dread reading it.” (Source 1).

The structural tradeoff also showed up in the chapter ordering. Jesse said his favorite chapter was on motivation, but it sat about 40% in: “I know for me, like a lot of books that I read, I get like 35, 40 percent in and then I sort of drop off. And so I wanted that if people read my book, I want them that 40 percent. I want them to get to motivation because I think that’s so important. So there is definitely stuff before that that I eventually had to cut out.” (Source 1).

What got cut: a section on how to get diagnosed, which “is difficult to do in a book anyway, because it’s so like regionally different. Like it depends what your insurance is, it depends what country you live in, even what state you’re in” (Source 1). Also cut: a deeper dive on brain networks and the default mode network, “even though I find that stuff really fascinating, it’s still sort of like not fully known… I don’t want to release this book. And then in like two years, be like, well, that’s way out of date now, because now new information is found out about how dopamine works.” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

When you can name the exact page that lost you in someone else’s work, you have a brief for your own. Jesse turned a single bad reading experience into three concrete decisions: short paragraphs, illustrations, and ruthless ordering of the highest-value chapter (motivation) in front of where he knew his audience would drop off. The deeper pattern is one most creators skip — designing the format around the reader you actually have, not the reader you wish you had. Many ADHD books “are very dense” because they were written for the audience that can read dense books. Jesse was writing for the reader who, like him, would put a book down forever after one impossible page. That meant cutting his favorite “fascinating” material on brain networks and a regionally-fragmented section on diagnosis, because they served the writer’s interest more than the reader’s. If you know your reader’s failure mode, you can engineer past it.

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