#Internet iceberg diagram how to#

Of his iceberg theory, she claims, it 'is also a glacier waterfall, infused with movement by his multi-focal aesthetic'. In her paper 'Hemingway's Camera Eye', Zoe Trodd explains that Hemingway uses repetition in prose to build a collage of snapshots to create an entire picture. Of the concept of omission, Hemingway wrote in 'The Art of the Short Story': 'You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.' By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the 'quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated.' His style added to the aesthetic: using 'declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world' with simple and plain language, Hemingway became 'the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century' according to biographer Meyers. Jenna Blum in The Author at Work, 2013 įrom reading Rudyard Kipling Hemingway absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. And that is what gives your story weight and gravitas. Hemingway said that only the tip of the iceberg showed in fiction-your reader will see only what is above the water-but the knowledge that you have about your character that never makes it into the story acts as the bulk of the iceberg. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.' A writer explained how it brings a story gravitas: If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless.

If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. In his essay 'The Art of the Short Story', Hemingway is clear about his method: 'A few things I have found to be true. įor example, Hemingway believed a writer could describe an action, such as Nick Adams fishing in ' Big Two-Hearted River,' while conveying a different message about the action itself-Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about the unpleasantness of his war experience.

#Internet iceberg diagram how to#

Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker believed that as a writer of short stories Hemingway learned 'how to get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth.' Baker also notes that the writing style of the 'iceberg theory' suggests that a story's narrative and nuanced complexities, complete with symbolism, operate under the surface of the story itself. and the omitted part would strengthen the story.' In chapter sixteen of Death in the Afternoon he compares his theory about writing to an iceberg. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything. In A Moveable Feast (1964), his posthumously published memoirs about his years as a young writer in Paris, he explains: 'I omitted the real end which was that the old man hanged himself. In 1923, Hemingway conceived of the idea of a new theory of writing after finishing his short story ' Out of Season'.

A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.Įrnest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. He believed fiction could be based on reality, but that if an experience were to be distilled, as he explained, then 'what he made up was truer than what he remembered'. From the Greco-Turkish War he gained valuable writing experience that he translated to the writing of fiction. As his biographer Jeffrey Meyers explains, 'he objectively reported only the immediate events in order to achieve a concentration and intensity of focus-a spotlight rather than a stage'.

As foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, while living in Paris in the early 1920s, he covered the Greco-Turkish War in more than a dozen articles. In his pieces he wrote about relevant events, excluding the background. He learned about corruption in city politics, and that in hospital emergency rooms and police stations a mask of cynicism was worn 'like armour to shield whatever vulnerabilities remained'. After graduating from high school he went to work as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, where he quickly learned that truth often lurks below the surface of a story. Like many other writers, Hemingway worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist.