Nigel   Oh, God, it’s bad, isn’t it? I don’t even know why you let me write with you.

Nick   Nigel, it’s good.

Nigel   Yeah?

Nick   It’s really good.

Nigel   Well, I put a lot of layers in it…

I’ve often wondered what makes a piece of writing shallow or deep. How can you tell?

Deep writing is profound writing. When you read a piece of deep writing, you’ll probably be visited by profound insights and counterintuitive truths. When you read a piece of shallow writing, you’ll probably not extract much more than what is literally on the page.

Okay, that was not helpful. What makes some writing profound? All we’ve done is kicked the can down Definition Road.

Writing is deep if it has many layers. Onion text. Palimpsestic text. Text with layers.

But what even are layers? I’m not quite sure.

Perhaps it has to do with how much meaning you can extract from a text. If all you can glean from a text after a focused perusal is what it’s literally saying, then you haven’t gone very deep into it. But instead, if you can detect stuff like metaphors in the text, then that is evidence of its deepness. Depth.

Like, The Lamb Broker is nominally about lambs, but beneath the surface it’s also making sharp commentary about prejudice and sex and cruelty. Contrast that film with the documentary Lambs of the Pacific Northwest, which is mostly just concerned with showing picturesque footage of lambs doing cute ovine things and has nothing to say about prejudice and sex and cruelty. Would it be fair to say that The Lamb Broker is the deeper work, on account of it having more layers?

(But how do you add layers to a work? Can you just, like, sprinkle them in? Like salt?)