> My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

My thought is a bit of an asides from the main essay content but this applies to real people as well as story characters, just because someone has feelings strongly doesn't mean anything other than that. A few of my strongest feelings about various things are rather mundane and at worst destructive. Doesn't make them deeper than a puddle.

Strength of a thing is a bad proxy for depth, complexity or interest.