Waiting Room Process Sneak Peek

I have been traveling throughout the United States this year, meeting people who struggle to access mental health care, and writing our collective stories in my soon-to-be-released book Waiting Room.

More than any other question, all of you have asked me how to write a book. How does it work? How do you get published? How do you know what to write about?

Listen, a lot of authors and folks in the publishing industry keep our process and our know-how to ourselves. Authoring is competitive. We have all faced rejections and many figure that more authors = less opportunity.

I don’t see it that way.

Just like meeting other people in need of mental health care has helped me to create a story that inspires and empowers other waiting patients, sharing what I know about writing can only help all of us to become better writers.

Keep reading to check out my process. Have a question that I didn’t answer here? Ask me at gabrielle@waitingroomcommunity.com. Then sign up for my newsletter and I’ll answer your questions in a future email.

Creating a concept

Before you do anything at all, you need to create a concept for your book. You do not need to sort out every detail, but at a high level, you must know:

• Where your story takes place

• Who are the main characters (sketch some background info)

• The major events that drive the story

Ideally, your concept can be a one- or two-sentence description. Jane is an administrative professional in Wisconsin who takes a DNA test and finds out she was adopted. Searching for her birth family, she explores her identity as someone who was born into a very different world than the one in which she was raised.

Developing a theme

Your concept can play out in an infinite number of ways. When you develop the theme, you give personality to the story so that it develops in a way that is true to your characters. This is also where you will find your source of tension. Tension is what happens when series of events cause your character to make important choices.

In the case of Jane the adoptee, we already know that identity will be a pivotal theme. But, if we choose to explore the theme of motherhood, we might find tension in the relationship between Jane and her two mothers or Jane and her potential children. Rather, we could maintain unremarkable maternal bonds but explore the theme of personality with regard to nature versus nurture. Perhaps Jane was raised to follow the rules and has missed out on a lot of experiences that other women her age have gone through. What does she find when she explores how her life could have been?

Lay the tracks

Think of this part as building a complex railroad system. Each of your characters will occupy a set of tracks. They will complete their journey to and from the station, over hills, along mountains, and through dark tunnels. Running parallel, but different, courses are the other trains (characters) on their own tracks. Write each story as an individual track. You will be surprised at how difficult it is to stay on one track at a time. Then, line each track up next to the others to see where they might interconnect. Here is a short version:

• Jane is raised by a single mother in rural Wisconsin.

• She followed all the rules, was an excellent student, married a dull partner, lives in the town where she grew up.

• She rarely travels or tries new things.

  —

• Jane’s adoptive mother suffers a violent encounter that leaves her unable to birth a child safely.

• She’s always longed to be a mother, so she adopts Jane.

• Her way of coping with the trauma is to live a very safe life. She stays at the same job even though better opportunities come her way, she lives in a gated community in the suburbs even though she’s always been a city girl at heart, and she never goes on dates.

  —

• Jane’s biological mother was 18 when she and her summer fling became pregnant.

• She’s a competitive sailor and did not have the capacity to raise a baby and fulfill her competitive dreams simultaneously.

• She’s been living in an artsy town in Mexico since retiring from competitive sailing. Now she teaches interpretive dance.

See how each story is only about one person? It’s easy to want to include Jane’s mother in Jane’s story, so if you do, be sure to separate them.

The tracks will help you to identify key questions so that you can answer them in your story. Why did Jane take a DNA test? Why did her biological mother retire to Mexico and get into interpretive dance? Does Jane’s adoptive mother enjoy her sheltered life or does she long for more?

Choose your devices

Authors are essentially storytellers. We get to arrange the facts (or fiction, as the case may be) in whatever way we feel will be the most powerful according to our theme. Perhaps you want to tell the story in a linear fashion—start with Jane’s biological mother, then move into Jane’s adoptive mother and her adoption, then talk about Jane’s childhood, adulthood, and so on. This is used a lot less often than you might think, and that is because most of our lives are rarely that linear.

Maybe, instead, you choose to introduce right before she meets her biological mother and then rewind to explore her past. Or, maybe you introduce future Jane and she tells us how she came to be exactly who she becomes.

Name your reader

Okay, I lied. This is actually one of the first things you will do. You need to know who is reading your book so that you know how to tell your story. Are you writing to fellow adoptees who might want something more emotionally accurate and nuanced? Are you writing to children? Is this a beach read that needs to stay fairly close to the surface? When you understand your audience, make them a character in your process. Build them a set of train tracks.

• Wendy, the reader, is feeling nostalgic as she heads home for Christmas. She’s in the airport and wants to find a book to read on the plane.

• She passes up business books and murders and lands on the story of Jane, expecting it to ping memories of her own childhood.

• She’s reading this on the plane and no family is perfect, so she wants to find bits of humor scattered in so that it is not so heavy.

Now you know how to write the story. You’re not telling a story for yourself—you’re telling the story to Wendy. She already likes your cover art, so let’s give her a best-selling journey to go with it.

Even though you’ll start by considering your reader, I made this the last step in your preparation process because you will want to end with the reader as well. After you finish the last sentence, go back to Wendy and make sure you’ve met her needs and given her some added delights along the way.

Any other questions? Email me and I’ll be happy to help!

xo,

Gabrielle

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