Are you Deeper Than You Think?

Influence has an important role in your writing. As you understand and work with different styles and influences, you’ll learn how to find your own voice.

This is part two of a 10-part series on style and voice. Writers in the Story Course and the Story Intensive can determine their writing style by taking the Style Diagnosis Quiz. This is a tool to help you highlight elements of style in your own work and point you to authors who may inspire you right now.

Read the rest of the Style Diagnosis series here: — Bookish — Fearless — Grounded Fantasist — Quirky but Serious — Intimate Orator — Visceralist — Minimalist — Pointy With Intellect — Stylist — Deeper Than You Think (below)

Are you Deeper Than You Think?

Your writing is deceptively straightforward and carefully crafted: it’s not too lush, not too pared down.

I just want to write a good story, you say to yourself, while you tinker with those four words of dialogue for the hundredth time, trying to get them just right.

Your characters and settings are tightly drawn, because you know that they have to be, if they’re going to come alive off the page.

But your concerns are more philosophical than you let on. Your stories are more engaged with the bigger questions of life itself than all of your well-developed narrative would have us believe at first glance.

Your readers might think your story is about a young family in upstate New York, or a train ride, or a court case. But when we reach the end, we know it is about nothing less than our own humanness.

Read the following books to learn about other Deeper Than You Think writers:

• Annabel Lyon, Oxygen

• Neil Smith, Bang, Crunch

• Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

• Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

• Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

• Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day

Please leave your suggestions for other Deeper Than You Think writers in the comments below.

xo,

Photo credit (top): Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash