Many novels of beginners and others fail before they even get started, because the ideas do not lend themselves to imaginative development. By this I mean that the ideas, to begin with, are such that trivialize experience. In such ideas possibility does not, even in defeat, exist. The possibility of an esthetic and moral development, the two becoming one. I am not arguing that worthwhile ideas are necessarily what we call affirmative experience. The test, however, is that man will be important whether he fails or succeeds; his life will have value for us; the reader will know this value and will feel it.
Granted that there are weak ideas, one would think that a writer would discover and discard his before he is too long involved in them, but such is not always the case. When one has learned the discipline of completing his stories (one of the signs of the professional writer is that he won't abandon a story if he can possibly help it) he will go on with a trivial idea to the very end.
The writer may think he is exercising his will by completing the story, but he is not exercising it by abandoning the idea as trivial. This is what may have occurred in some of the later work of Mark Twain, of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others. At this point one may ask: isn't it possible that the ideas of these writers are good but that there is a deficiency of some sort in carrying out the conception, a failure of taste or talent? That is always a danger with any writer, but I think that we may say that even when a man's creative powers, for one reason or another, are on the wane, he can still deal with good ideasfor instance, Tolstoy in RESURRECTION and Faulkner in some of his latest pieces. Compare with Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY and Hemingway's ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.
It seems to me that the most important thing a writer can do to help himself to a good book is first to help himself to a significant idea, a worthwhile theme. “To create a mighty book,” said Melville, “one must have a mighty theme.” By theme is meant idea or concept, perhaps argument; it can of course mean both.
Right now I want to make an obvious statement: that a significant idea (a mighty theme) is not easy to come by. That in order to come by it the author must strive, must strain; he must enlarge himself and his experience. He must obviously not grab at the first thought that flies through his head, no matter how strongly it appeals to him. One says, look into yourself and write, but that is often not enough, because the self may be shallow, even a talented writer's self. I would say, look into the world and write; look into your brother's heart and write. Often if we make the attempt to understand others we begin to understand ourselves. At this point look into your heart and write.
Is there such a thing as a worthwhile idea for a novel, per se? Someone may justly ask: Mayn't it be said that writers working with, let us say, Melville's mighty theme: "the mystery of iniquity" and Faulkner's "the human heart in conflict with itself," can fail with them, come to artistic disaster? Obviously they can, and have. A child who chances upon these themes may fail with them, and so may a writer who doesn't understand them, who can't see farther than the length of his arm. But mayn't it be said that a writer who alights upon these ideas, who discovers them through his own searching, his experience and meditation, who is moved by them, by a vision of the drama inherent in them, by their enormous possibilities of imaginative development, who senses the concealed veins in them, will he not, given the fact that he is as talented as the next man, have far greater opportunities to produce something of importance than he who doesn't have such ideas and can't seem to acquire them?
Let me define a significant idea for a writer as one that is basically dramatic and will therefore lend itself to the uses of imagination. It will have a strong ideational content and compel the writer, in one way or another to deal with ideas as ideas. It will in the end, whether it is affirmatively handled or not, in the sense of an affirmative philosophy of life, so long as it achieves its necessary form, make man seem important, even great, his life of extraordinary importance; and in having these possibilities the idea may be said to possess moral content. At the very least we can say that a writer, good or bad, working with themes that have throughout history been considered to be worthy, important, significant, has a better opportunity for true intellectual and esthetic achievement than he working with ideas that yield little or nothing in the way of insights about man and his condition to the reader. I could now endlessly qualify what I have just said but I shall leave it as it stands.
Why are significant ideas so hard to come by and halfbaked ones so easy?
1. There are times when society itself conceals the traditionally valuable ideas.I think it is now clear what I meant when I said before that it was necessary to strive for the significant theme, to enlarge the self to encompass it. I might add that I am one of those who feeldespite a good deal of evidence to the contrarythat the enlargement of one's character as a person, his wisdom, knowledge, power to love, will not hurt him as an artist.
2. The writer may not be able to recognize the valuable ideas because he has had no education to speak of: no knowledge of himself; no knowledge of the ideals of Western Civilization; no mature philosophy of life.
3. He may not be serious as a writer, a trickster, immature, dishonest so that he will settle for the first thing that looks good. Anything goes if he can possibly sell it and too often he can.
4. He may have a false idea of what drama is, will equate it with trauma or sickness or sensationalism.
5. He may be afraid to take a chance with material that is not to a large extent autobiographical: he may rely too strongly on memory and not enough on invention.
6. He may be led astray by attempting to write what his contemporaries, as contemporaries, are writing. In too many cases he knows modern writing but hasn't read anything before 1900.
7. He may have no love for anyone but himself.
Bernard Malamud in Talking Horse: On Life and Work
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