The Iceberg

Let’s start off with a basic scenario; you’re waiting for someone—in a shopping center, in a café, at the park, anyplace public with other people milling about—and you’ve arrived early enough to people-watch. You see people hunched over laptops, reading books or newspapers, and chatting in small groups, but you see one person on the phone sitting off to the side. The conversation appears intimate; you can tell by the way expression on their face and certain buzzwords that ring of familiarity. Suddenly, their attention is diverted to the person walking quickly toward them, whom they acknowledge with a gesture, and then the phone call is ended abruptly while that person’s entire demeanor transforms—you think you can detect a hint of guilt.

What happens next? Based upon the picture you’ve already built in your mind, maybe the next thing you imagine is a tense conversation between a dysfunctional couple. There are cues which would support your assumptions, but there are quite a few details intentionally missing from the description, like:

• Their gender.
• How they are dressed.
• Whether the person on the phone is actually holding it to their ear or is using a Bluetooth.
• Exactly which buzzwords are used.

Identifying any of the items from this list in the description may have sharpened the image, but it could also change it entirely. If you haven’t already, picture the two as male and female, dressed casually, and it was the female on the phone (holding it to her ear). Now consider how different things would be if the two are both male, wearing expensive clothing, and the man on the phone was using a Bluetooth earpiece (which, by the way, would allow that character to leave the call connected--talk about a scene-changer). Mix and match any way you want and the scene has the potential to change drastically. The point is, you are in the middle of a scene in which an entire back story is built based on what you see and presumption is based on your personal experience.

Take a look at the first paragraph of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

That’s all you get. This setup constitutes the longest paragraph in the story and precludes a rather ambiguous conversation between the two main characters. All Hemingway shows us for sure is that they’re drinking beer as they wait for the train, he’s an American (an image that has most definitely changed since Hemingway wrote this story), and she’s a girl (nationality curiously undefined). Tense dialog follows this introduction, signifying a possible change in their relationship. There are two standout lines which hint at what is really going on without saying it outright:

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

And shortly he answers one of her questions by saying:

“We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.”

Hemingway trusts you to see the rest of the iceberg. As writers, our jobs should be to decide whether or not we can show only the tip of the iceberg and trust readers to envision the rest of it on their own. The trick is in getting the reader involved, to make the reader work at it without having to work so hard that they don’t care and simply give up. Sometimes the situation may dictate that we have to lay everything out on the table, but if I read a story in which the author did that, I doubt I’d continue reading for very long—most likely due to a slight case of insulted intelligence.