The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.
Background
Like many other writers, Hemingway worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. 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. 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". In his pieces he wrote about relevant events, excluding the background. 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. 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". From the Greco-Turkish War he gained valuable writing experience that he translated to the writing of fiction. 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".
Definition
In 1923, Hemingway conceived of the idea of a new theory of writing after finishing his short story "Out of Season". 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 [of "Out of Season"] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything... 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.
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.
For 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. In his essay "The Art of the Short Story", Hemingway is clear about his method: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. 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:
From reading Rudyard Kipling, Hemingway absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. 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.