07/17/2025
📚 What is the iceberg theory?
Ernest Hemingway believed that what truly matters in a story shouldn’t be said outright. That the important things should remain beneath the surface, like an iceberg: just a visible tip, with the weight of the story submerged, holding everything up from below.
He laid it out in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bullfighting that also became a kind of manifesto on writing. There, he wrote:
“If a writer of prose knows enough about 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.
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
That’s the key: not omitting out of ignorance, but out of mastery. What’s left unsaid should still be felt, not simply missing.
🎯 Did Hemingway invent this idea?
No. Others used it before him, Chekhov, for instance, but Hemingway gave it form, name, and method. For him, good writing meant precision, no embellishment, and trust in the reader’s ability to grasp what wasn’t spelled out.
🔍 Does it still work today?
Yes, when used wisely.
In short fiction, autofiction, screenwriting, or emotionally subtle narratives, the iceberg is still a powerful tool. It gives readers an active role: nothing is handed to them, which draws them in.
But it’s not for everything. It doesn’t work for explaining complex ideas in an essay, for marketing, or for writing children's books. And if used poorly, it can result in flat, cold prose that says nothing, and suggests even less.
🧠 Writing with the iceberg takes knowledge, not shortcuts.
You leave out what you understand, not what you haven’t figured out.
📌 Hemingway didn’t invent the art of suggestion, but he turned it into a deliberate poetics. And while it’s not a universal law, it remains a valuable lesson: the unsaid can carry just as much meaning, if you know what you’re doing.
