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.
Ernest Hemingway
hemingway had a lot of fancies and fantasies about his life. Hemingway cannot be considered the lone writer without considering the hatchetman his editor who had his own ideas about what ought ‘show.’ Hemingway bought into his publisher’s publicity about him, spinning him as spare and therefor somehow
twee. Hemingway is ok, but John Hershey, Steinbeck, know how to tell a h of a story and sustain it over many pages. Hemingway is more of a short story writer. It makes sense as he had much more interest in pursuing various poisons, that is, other matters than writing
Agreed. Hemingway bought into his press. His short stories are much better reads than his novels.
As with all rules, this one works well in context and fails completely out of context. The rules of chess don’t work for football.
Rule 112: No infodumps.
Wells starts War of the Worlds with an infodump. Joe Haldeman’s novella The Only War We’ve Got has an infodump that goes on for pages, and it’s vital to the story.
I have a work-in-progress set in an asteroid construct. I have written a bible about the world to keep all the details straight. It includes drawings and mathematics. I do not foist these off on my readers. (I suffered for my art and now it’s your turn!) From time to time, I show pieces of the story to critics (Readers? Writer’s circle? Whatever.) Some love it. They like knowing they see only the tip of the tip of the iceberg and go haring off to puzzle out the details. (Get this: Even though I never wrote a word about the engines in the story, two readers puzzled out the propulsion of the tugs from the dimensions of an ice shard.) The reader whose opinion I respect most wants more detail; can’t see the world without having me paint it in front of her face and can’t imagine it for herself.
So what does this mean?
You gotta find your audience. Those who want Weberesque detail are not my audience. Those who will take a hint and spend a couple of hours speculating about propulsion systems are.
PS Having done the work to build the bible makes it easier for me to write scenes in this world. Still come up with missing details. F’rinstance, how many seconds does it take an elevator to fall from the 0.1G ring to the 0.5G ring and decelerate to a stop and never exceed 0.6G? The reader will never see it, but I gotta know so that I can get the timing right.
I just read an SF novel in which the enemy aliens were referred to as rat-like in the first scene. About a third of the way through the book we get the fact illicit war material shipments can be tagged as going to the enemy if they include Earth foodstuffs as the enemy originated on Earth millions of years ago. Two-thirds through we find out the enemy is waging a genocidal war on humanity because the discovery they are transplanted Earthlings rather than a special creation, as they interpret their fossil record, offends the core of their self-image.
The first data point is one line. The second another line or two. The third a paragraph. That very brief exposition gives the reader a lot of information. We don’t find out why the enemy is implacable until the two-third mark, then it’s a throw away remark that everyone in-universe knows. I was impressed the book didn’t start with a narrative exposition of the enemy’s true character and why the war was being fought.
The book is To Honor You Call Us by H Paul Honsinger.
That’s called kuttnering.
But sometimes you need to remind your readers that the rest of that iceberg is down there, lest they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Remind or tell ’em to begin with. Relying on a reader to notice what’s underneath requires them to have a comparable or compatible starting culture, education, framework, etc. as the author. Which is fine, if that’s the specific audience you’re going for.
If not? You can expect to confuse your readers or be misunderstood by them.
For example, if someone’s used to impudence being a form of good-natured fun, they’ll read a scene where it appears very differently from someone who sees that behavior as necessarily disrespectful or otherwise negative. (Those two readers will also define “impudence” differently and interpret different actions and such in different ways.)
I remember finding Hemingway really confusing when I was trying to read him at about 10 and didn’t know much about the cultural context of when he was writing. Robert Lewis Stevenson and HG Wells were a lot easier to understand, for me at that age.
These days, I appreciate Hemingway’s ability to be sparse with words, and I have nothing against folks who enjoy him, but I still don’t care for his writing. I’ve been annoyed by more than one of his stories because it required unwarranted assumptions along the lines of “Oh, red eyes must mean crying” to be able to understand the story, although red eyes can easily indicate multiple other things. (That’s an analogy; I don’t remember if that was a specific example.)
What I’ve read by Charlotte Perkins Gillman and Flannery O’Connor makes more sense once you know the cultural and historical context, but at least the stories are coherent and comprehensible without it.
Granted, some of that difference in comprehension ease could be due to having more in common with Gillman and O’Connor (ex. we’re all female).
Agreed, and when it’s space opera with alien critters and cultures (that you just made up) you have to explain things to help get your reader on the same page.
Sometimes you can let the reader know that the alien is ‘like a furry Klingon’ before they act like one, sometimes it works better to let them sound off — and then let the reader know that your character(s) had expected something like that out of a ‘furry Klingon’.
It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
My character is riding a horse. If I want the reader to know what that feels like, I have to describe it. If I want the reader to focus on the character, the details of riding a horse should be left out. If I want the reader to know that the character knows a lot about horses, I add one telling detail and imply all the rest.
But no matter how I write the scene, I get my wife to read it to be sure I’ve gotten the horse right.