Welcome to the first installment of my craft series, Emotionally Honest Fiction. As this is a work-in-progress, you will notice some dangling threads: diagrams rendered in shorthand, lists that are incomplete (any help much appreciated in comments), and probably some ideas that I could develop more. All comments and writing exercises very much welcome. Thank you for subscribing, and let’s dive in!
[Diagram: Say little < Convey a lot]
This technique of conveying emotion, which I have diagrammed into convenient shorthand above, has been most indelibly articulated by Ernest Hemingway in his “iceberg theory” of writing:
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. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. (Death in the Afternoon)
While Ernesto and I might disagree about many things, we are of one mind about the stark difference between omission from lack of knowledge and omission from deliberate artistic choice. The former results in a fatal hollowness in one’s work. In fact, I would say that this is why A Farewell to Arms, for all of its excellent qualities, ultimately fails to achieve what it sets out to do. It fully realizes its hero’s inner landscape beneath the iceberg, but the inner life of the army nurse he falls in love with is as shallow-keeled as a fishing boat. But we’ll come back to the old man’s tragic machismo a bit later.
Another way to put this might be emotion by implication, or inference. Even as Hemingway-the-character has slowly fallen out of grace, his pioneering literary techniques continue to reverberate across the field. For better or for worse, minimalism has been in for over a hundred years, and it does not seem to be in any hurry to give up its scepter and crown. Even practitioners of literary maximalism have holographic emotion in their toolbox, so let’s work through different ways of using holographic emotion, and then consider some of its pitfalls.
The basic technique at play is to take a compact but highly emotionally charged story object and deploy it in such a way that its emotional charge is re-signified to create change in the reader’s understanding without you as the writer explicitly detailing the nature of that change.
[Diagram: Story object projecting emotion LEADING TO context evolving LEADING TO moving emotion]