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. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.
When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway as photographed for the 1940 edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls
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