The Iceberg Revisited
Re-reading Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories, I’m reminded of that Hemingway line—the iceberg theory—that’s been taken as a manifesto for minimalist fiction:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what [s]he is writing about [s]he may omit things that [s]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. A writer who omits things because [s]he does not know them only makes hollow places in [her]his writing.
I’d always understood this an endorsement or explanation of a kind of pared-back presence on the page; details left unexplained, dialogue in which, without background, the words seem to weigh more, as in Hempel’s “Today Will Be A Quiet Day”:
They had already said good night some minutes earlier when the boy and girl heard their father’s voice in the dark.
“Kids, I just remembered—I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?”
It was his daughter who spoke. “Let’s get it over with,” she said. “Let’s get the bad news over with.”
The father smiled. They are all right, he decided. My kids are as right as this rain. He smiled at the exact spots he knew their heads were turned to his, and doubted he would ever feel—not better, but more than he did now.
“I lied,” he said. “There is no bad news.”
Coming after an afternoon of the kids bickering—to a fairly ordinary degree, but still, bickering—the distance opened up by “It was his daughter who spoke,” instead of simply “his daughter said,” seems ominous, while “he decided” cryptically undermines his cheery conclusion (this was something he needed to decide?) And yet, there is no bad news! So maybe there isn’t. Leaving out what had led him to this thought gives it makes it mysterious in a way that feels very much like listening in on a real person. It lodges in our heads—in mine anyway—because we don’t know how to judge his decision, nor do we know why it’s significant that it’s his daughter who speaks. And I don’t want to know. The point is not knowing.
Hempel says that:
People sometimes ask me, “Do you just write a lot and then take away the extraneous parts?” No. I certainly revise, but not in the manner of taking out great amounts of writing so that I’m left with a more distilled kind of prose. What comes out the first time is pretty distilled.
I’m just not wordy. I am in life, but I’m not on the page. The kind of revision I do is fine-tuning, it’s tightening, it’s dispatching a metaphor and getting one that’s closer to what I mean. It’s every kind of revision except starting with many, many pages and whittling down to a short short. That’s not how it happens.
The unseen part isn’t quantity, what’s left or taken out. It’s what’s put in—time, and rough drafts, as the writer finds what her characters would say, knows what they’d intend but leave unsaid, and what they’d understand. The just-right detail. Sometimes—rarely—that happens quickly. For me, more often, the unseen part of a story is more like seventy eighths than seven. They’re all in a folder named “drafts.”
