On top of the manliest and most skillful writers alive is Ernest Hemingway. Among his works, I've read "The old man & the sea" & "For whom the bell tolls". What struck me in his writing is how simple and straightforward he is, compared to other writers I've studied in school. Unlike Joyce, Dos Passos, Woolf or that type of overheated intellectual, he seemed to focus on the story, more of the complexity of his own mind.
My interest for Hemingway being fairly recent, I have found out that the man had a theory about that. He called that "The Iceberg Principle" or "Theory Of Omission". He described it in Death In The Afternoon, like this:
"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 the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."
The thought behind that (as I understand it) is that the words written on the paper take their strenght from what you don't tell your reader. For example, a rugged and explosive individual will not talk about his abusive father, but the reach of his word and his actions will bear the weight of generations of abuse and the limitations of controlling individuals. There is another great example of that in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost & Damned when the protagonist Johnny Klebitz rescues his ex-girlfriend Ashley from a bunch of addicts. They never blame each other, never talk about the past relationship. Here's a sample of the conversation, as Johnny is about to leave:
Ashley Butler: Just say the word, sugar, and we'll ride off into the sunset.
Johnny Klebitz: Yeah, you, me, and that little habit of yours.
Ashley Butler: You're my habit, Johnny.
The reader can draw the whole fractured relationship in between Johnny and Ashley from this. They don't talk about it, but you can tell that Johnny still loves Ashley, but dumped her because of her drug addiction. This implied story creates by itself more tension in the dialogue than if both protagonist would've argued. Love it or hate it, Grand Theft Auto is still a leader in the video games industry in terms of writing.
The effective application of the theory of omission might just be what separates true writers from wannabes. Showing, instead of telling is what fiction is all about after all. The shadow of Ernest Hemingway is all over contemporary literature. With a fiction that relies on the unsaid and on "what lies beneath", guys like James Ellroy, Dennis Lehane and even Cormac McCarthy owe a lot to the first writer that focused on the dignity of movement of the iceberg in order to free his novels from heavy and unnecessary background.
