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The Writing of Fiction
writing CRITICAL

Choosing a Subject: Judgment on Life & the Gold-Mine Test

The Writing of Fiction Edith Wharton
subject judgment-on-life moral-radiation gold-mine-test

Key Principle

A subject must pass two tests before a word is written.

1. It must shed light on moral experience. A subject is only worth writing if it "responds in some way to that mysterious need of a judgment on life" — if it "sheds a light on our moral experience." Lacking that "vital radiation," it is "a meaningless scrap of fact torn out of its context." The reader's unconscious question is always: "What am I being told this story for? What judgment on life does it contain for me?"

2. It must match the writer's power to extract it (the gold-mine test). A subject is judged twice — in itself, and "against the novelist's power to extract its contents." "A gold mine is worth nothing unless the owner has the machinery for extracting the ore." This guards against the false good-subject: a subject with surface attraction that the particular writer cannot actually mine.

Why This Matters

The first test is what separates fiction from mere reportage or sensation; the second is what separates a wise writer from an over-reaching one. Confuse "interesting material" with "a subject I can realize," and you produce the big thing done loosely instead of the small thing done deeply. Of twenty tempting subjects, Wharton warns, "probably but one is 'fit for the hand' of the limited person one happens to be."

This is not moralizing. Wharton explicitly rejects the "water-tight compartment between 'art' and 'morality.'" The only escape from the moral dimension is into "a pathological world ... an idiot's tale, signifying nothing." A subject with genuine moral radiation is already a kind of pre-selection — "some phase of our common plight" standing "forth dramatically and typically."

Good Examples

  • The creative vision "seeks by instinct those subjects in which some phase of our common plight stands forth dramatically and typically" — subjects that are themselves a foreshortening of life's "dispersed and inconclusive occurrences."
  • The hard practical rule that follows from the gold-mine test: "do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially."

Counterpoints

  • The false good-subject: surface attraction with no extractable depth — it dazzles in conception and collapses in execution because the writer never had the machinery to mine it.
  • The pathological/sensational subject: signifies nothing because it has been severed from the common moral experience that would make a reader care.

Key Quotes

"A good subject, then, must contain in itself something that sheds a light on our moral experience." — Edith Wharton, Chapter I: In General

"A gold mine is worth nothing unless the owner has the machinery for extracting the ore." — Edith Wharton, Chapter I: In General

Rules of Thumb

  • Test every subject twice: Does it shed light on moral experience? and Can I, specifically, mine it?
  • When vision outruns talent, choose the smaller subject you can realize fully over the grand one you can only sketch.
  • If you cannot answer "what judgment on life does this contain?", you do not yet have a subject.

Related References