I once went on a date with a woman I met through a newspaper singles page. We got together in person in a wine bar in Victoria. I bought drinks and we started talking. She told me something about herself, then I talked but after only a few minutes, she said, “Do you know what your problem is, Terry?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know but before I could answer she said, “You’re too deep.” She said ‘deep’ as if it was a disease. “You need to lighten up.” I got up without finishing my drink, said “Goodbye,” and walked out.

It wasn’t really the first time. Not on a date, exactly. Frequently I’d had people come up to me and say things like, “Smile – it might never happen!” when I’d just been happily thinking.

It took me many years to work out that the problem wasn’t with me being deep, it was more with them being shallow. At least where causality and motive are concerned.

Writers need to face the ‘deep’ problem, and with their date – the reader. But let’s get something out of the way right from the start: ‘deep’ is not the chronically serious/intellectual disease that the shallow like to declare. It’s simply being thorough. Those who don’t like deep are actually just avoiding responsibility. You don’t need a degree in theoretical physics to work out when someone you’re close to wants support; you just need to care.

So, while readers might care about the facts of the matter of their obsession, they don’t necessarily care about the hidden, important stuff that makes their favourite characters tick. Readers identify with characters but they don’t chaperone; they don’t parent; they don’t coach them. That’s the writer’s job.

Readers may think a lot about characters and plots and details, but they don’t take on the responsibility of creating and maintaining the largely unseen mental and emotional buttressings that ensure there is depth behind the stories.

A writer should never apologise for depth. He should revel in it; gladly accept what it means – which is to be always building it, with thought and belief and invention. He never settles for the comfort of simply amassing knowledge from the already-created.

Depth is commitment, in terms of time and love and belief. And a writer has to be very careful not to dilute it, in order to, say, please the immediate needs of the reader. If he does, the result can be stories that the reader finds easily accessible, immediately satisfying, but in the long term somewhat unsatisfying.

Readers dip in and out of stories but a writer is never off. He won’t always actually be writing. In fact some writers use writing as a way of not being on, odd though that sounds. But the act of putting words on a page can be avoiding the responsibility of depth. Let’s face it, many commercial writers hardly ever stop writing but in the process usually manage to avoid much depth.

Depth in our own person probably derives more from what goes wrong in our lives, not according to plan; from losing when we’d expected to win; from unfair and unexpected slaps in the face. And let’s remember that many readers disappear into a book in order to escape those very slaps in the face.

But that doesn’t mean a writer should produce characters that he believes readers will feel comfortable with. Part of a reader’s need to escape is in fact to spend time with characters who have the very depth he hopes to win for himself, even if he isn’t aware of it.

And again, characters with depth doesn’t necessarily mean they have grim, ‘realistic’, outlooks on a miserable life. Depth can mean the challenge of spontaneous humour, wit, the ability to elevate any situation with insight. And in this, the always-on writer may find himself having to constantly navigate between the demands of the so-called social interpretation skills of literary fiction that is also often spiritually hollow, and the more honest entertaining commercial stories that can ultimate disappoint by never attempting to be more than the sum of their genre-specific parts.

Depth is found in the cracks between the various worlds of demanded compliance we’re all constantly confronted by. As soon as a story of genuine idiosyncrasy is discovered it’s turned into a cult. An enthusiastic but derivative story about a boy wizard is turned into an infallible religion which the author is only too willing to follow. A thrilling novel about teens having to fight to the death is extended into a repetitional cash cow.

Depth is the cradle of real magic; shallow just chases uninformed applause.