Writing influenced
by Hemingway

Hemingway is the most talked-about and least carefully read influence in the English-language minimalist tradition. Most writers know the iceberg theory in the same way most people know Newton: vaguely, from a distance, without having done the maths. The iceberg theory is not a style tip. It is a complete theory of how meaning works in fiction.

The iceberg theory, fully understood

Hemingway wrote about the theory directly: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because they do not know them only makes hollow places in the story. The writer must know everything he omits, and omit it deliberately. What the reader encounters on the surface of the story is one eighth of what the writer knows. The other seven eighths are felt, not read.

This is a demanding theory. It requires the writer to do more work, not less. The story can only carry the weight of its submerged material if that material is fully realised, fully known, and then fully trusted to be felt without being stated. Most writers who try to write like Hemingway omit things they do not know. The result is emptiness rather than depth.

The distinction is crucial and it is felt by the reader. Depth that comes from fully imagined, deliberately withheld material feels different from thinness that comes from not thinking. One produces the sensation of something large below the surface. The other produces the sensation of nothing there at all.

The declarative sentence

Hemingway’s sentences are short and declarative. Subject, verb, object. And then another sentence. The rhythm accumulates. It does not build in the way Faulkner’s sentences build, through subordination and complexity, but it does build. Each simple sentence carries more weight because of the ones before it.

This is a prose rhythm that requires more revision than complex prose. The simple sentence has nowhere to hide. If it is imprecise, the imprecision is immediately visible. If it is true, it is true entirely. The declarative sentence makes no argument about tone or feeling. It states. The reader supplies the tone from the accumulation of statements.

“The afternoon was hot and a little windy.” This is not description of weather. In context, it is the emotional state of the scene. The emotional state is never named. It is established through the precision of the physical detail. This is what the declarative sentence can do when it is exact: it creates feeling through fact.

What’s left unsaid

“Hills Like White Elephants” is about an abortion. The word abortion does not appear in the story. Two people sit at a bar at a railway junction in Spain. They drink and they talk. What they talk about is not what they are talking about. The gap between what is said and what is meant is the story. The gap is never named. It is felt by the reader with an accuracy that direct treatment of the subject could not produce.

This is Hemingway’s specific contribution to the short story: the demonstration that the subject of a story need not be named to be present. The subject can be so thoroughly present in what surrounds it that naming it would be a reduction. The reader arrives at the subject through the accumulation of everything else, which is a more direct route than being told.

“A Farewell to Arms” is a love story and a war story and a story about loss. Hemingway does not editorialize about any of these things. He describes. He records dialogue. He notes weather and wine and trains. The emotional content is so fully present in the described world that the reader arrives at feeling without being instructed.

What Hemingway teaches flash fiction writers

The declarative sentence. The chosen detail. The restraint of emotional commentary. These are not stylistic preferences. They are technical positions. Hemingway arrived at them through years of journalism, through his belief that a writer who has witnessed something true can transmit that truth through its most accurate, most concrete description. The truth is in the specific. The specific is all you need.

Read these first:

“The iceberg theory is a theory of trust. Trust in the material. Trust in the reader. Trust that what you know is there, underneath the sentence, will be felt through the sentence. Most writers don’t have this trust yet. The way to build it is to rewrite until the sentence is carrying everything.”

— David, Tumbleweed Words