The Size of Ideas

When I was in graduate school, I had a friend who set out to write a novel about Nothing. This was many decades before Seinfeld's TV series. Anyway, I thought the idea was great in its way. I can't recall exactly how the novel began, but it was something like this. "Tom was afraid of Nothing. He understood that Nothing could hurt him. He had no allies. People who believed in Nothing were scarce, and most of them argued that Nothing was too good for him."   And so on. My friend's problem was that the idea was excellent for a short-short story, but it could not support a novel. We see something like that in Democratic politics, where proposing a very small raise in the minimum wage cannot support a winning campaign.