In my practice as a writer and a book editor and coach, I often ask myself and my clients: can you make this worse?

 

What I mean by that is:

Can you go deeper?

What is under this layer?

Have you gotten to the bottom of things here?

Or do you need to do more spelunking?

 

When I was in graduate school I needed to write a novel.

I wasn’t just “wanting” to write a novel. Or “longing” to write one.

I mean I really needed to: I had to have a book-length dissertation to get my Ph.D.

 

Which I also was. I had been a reader all my life and couldn’t imagine any better fate than actually become a writer—one of those wizards who had changed my life by taking me to someone else’s

 

Which was why I was in a graduate program in creative writing.

 

But to get the actual degree, I had to write a book.

 

And I had no idea how.

 

I was doing an independent study on one of my favorite writers of all time—Virginia Woolf. In it, I was comparing her short story “Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street” with her gorgeous, tragic novel, Mrs. Dalloway.

 

This is how the short story starts:

 

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself.

Big Ben was striking as she stepped out into the street. It was eleven o’clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to children on a beach. But there was something solemn in the deliberate swing of the repeated strokes; something stirring in the murmur of wheels and the shuffle of footsteps.

 

And this is how the novel starts:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.

The difference between gloves and flowers, between a shopping trip and going out while your house is being prepared for a party: worlds are opening up!

 

Virginia Woolf looked underneath her short story and found a novel.

 

The novel stretches out, allows for more breath, more scope, from the first sentence on.

 

And in so doing it also allows for much much more meaning.

 

In the novel, next to the wealthy socialite’s life—curtailed as it may be—lies the tragic story of Septimus Smith, a WWI veteran who will not survive the novel. And Clarissa, without ever meeting the man, knows similar depths.

 

I plunged into a short story I’d written, “The Algebra of Snow,” and found similar depths, a story beneath the short story.

 

And there was my dissertation, a book that was nominated for a Pushcart Award, and my first published novel.

 

What lies beneath your story, your day, your business, your partnerships, your moment? What are the depths?

 

What a lark! What a plunge!