Writing Blog Number 2 (continued)

20251112 Hemingway's Iceberg

Hemingway’s Iceberg

Now, I have brought this up before, but someone asked me about it recently, and so I thought I’d do a whole post about this: Hemingway’s Iceberg on Info-dumping!

So, basically, Hemingway reckoned you should do a heap of research or character development or world-building. An absolutele heap. And then you should not include seven-eighths of all that hard work. The tip, that top one-eighth, that is all you see of an iceberg in the ocean should be also all you see of your research. However, there is a catch. Most astute readers will work out if you do not actually know that other seven-eighths. They have a “feeling” that the writing lacks substance. To continue with the frozen water metaphor, instead of being an ice-berg, it’s just an ice floe travelling free and merry.
         In fact, Hemingway called it the ‘Theory of Omission.’ He wrote that he believed he could tell the quality of a written piece by looking at the quality of what was omitted from the final work.

If a beta reader still gets the story completely without all the stuff you have omitted, then it was not necessary at all. Info-dumps can also slow the narrative down to a snail’s pace, breaking the reader’s enjoyment of a story. Of course, if there is no information, then the reader can be confused. One-eighth; that’s all you need.
         Stephen King said that a second draft should be 10% shorter than the first, and a lot of the stuff deleted is the extraneous information that makes a writer feel clever but bores the pants off the reader. You just have to brave enough to cull what is not necessary.

Part of the problem is when a writer writes a 3-page character study of each MC and yet only a paragraph fits in. Or they write a 5k word essay on the land they have created, but five paragraphs spread through the book is all that is needed. Writers have done this work and – dagnabbit! – they are going to show the world how clever they are.
         But remember seven-eighths hidden… and the fact readers will know if that unseen seven-eighths is not there.