Ernest Hemingway believed omission made a story stronger.

Like an iceberg invisibly towering below the ocean’s surface, he wrote with the belief that most of a story should be hidden from the reader, leaving ample room for their imagination to run wild.

Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”––as he would later coin it––is most prevalent in the intimate moments of his novels and short stories.

Unlike any other writer before him or since, Hemingway was able to write about sex without actually writing about sex.

Here’s one such example from A Farewell to Arms…

“

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.

”

At the end of that excerpt, Hemingway wrote “…all other things were unreal”, allowing the reader to make their own assumptions of what those “other things” were.

If there is any lesson in Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”, it’s this…

Some things are made better by being left unsaid.

By Cole Schafer.

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