BRAINSTORMING YOUR NOVEL
From First Spark to Blockbuster
by Linda Needham
Needham presents her novel-brainstorming workshop in book form.
The author, a novelist who has written more than a dozen books (including several USA Today bestsellers), offers the text version of a brainstorming workshop she has run at many in-person writing conferences over the course of her career. Breaking the process of developing the elements of a novel down into six key parts, Needham explains—using examples from her own work and that of several anonymous volunteers—how to go from a vague idea to a fleshed-out concept that is ready to be written and shared with editors and readers. Each of the steps (idea, meaning, theme words, premise, characters, and elevator pitch) is covered in a separate chapter. The book demonstrates how following Needham’s process allows the writer to build on each previous step’s work, developing and refining the novel’s central concept to understand not only what the story will be about, but why it matters and how it will be conveyed to the eventual reader. The author is very clear about the importance of starting out with “an idea, not a story” and provides a concrete path for getting from the former to the latter.
The book has its origins in a workshop Needham offered at genre-specific writing conferences, and the readers who will find it most useful are those looking to write traditional (not experimental) fiction. The author gives solid explanations of the crucial elements of a novel, particularly theme, which she coherently outlines both in terms of its expression throughout the novel and its value to the writer (“Theme ought to run deeply through your story, and can be a great help in staying on track, and making sure that characters remain true to themselves and thereby to your story”). The premise, by contrast, is “the promise you make to your readers that your characters and their struggles along their journey will have meaning in the end,” and Needham shows how to turn a premise into a fully developed plot, with clear characters and conflicts, that can be easily summarized in both a one-sentence logline and a paragraphlong elevator pitch, allowing the writer to have well-defined expectations of where the story will go before beginning to write it. The book is aimed at novice writers, laying out the basic concepts of plot, conflict, and character, and the “volunteer brainstormer” examples that appear in each chapter effectively illustrate the concepts put to use in similar ways despite the substantive differences between the story ideas presented. However, these examples are used excessively—after including them in each of the chapters explaining the six steps, Needham then repeats each of the examples, in full, after the conclusion of the main narrative, adding 30 pages to the book’s main text without providing additional material. For readers who find the preceding pages useful, however, the book is a solid and well-written introduction to the building blocks of novel writing that offers a clear path to follow.A concise but comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of brainstorming a novel.