Big, Two-Hearted River

Further updates from the University of Idaho Hemingway Festival…

Last night I went to hear Michael Dahlie, assorted U of I faculty, and a Hemingway scholar discuss their favorite Hemingway stories. It was a lively discussion, but one point they kept returning to was the whole “iceberg theory” of fiction… Hemingway’s idea that you can leave a lot of information out of a story, but as long as the author knows the info and has it in mind as he writes, the readers will somehow intuit this.

Dahlie made what was, I think, a somewhat unpopular comment at the time: that Hemingway could only get away with this because he was already known. I think there is a lot of truth to this. Not just that Hemingway was already famous and admired, but everyone knew what his favorite themes were: war, danger, alcohol, the impossibility of true understanding between men and women… So people knew what to look for. In my own writing, I gather that people rarely get the unseen thing I’m talking about; indeed, they rarely even try. Or possibly there’s a trick to it I haven’t figured out yet? But Hemingway says it requires only confidence. Ha.

I have a story to turn in on Thursday, anyway, and while I certainly wouldn’t call it “Hemingway-esque”, there is a lot going on in it that remains unspoken. We’ll see what the smart readers here in Idaho make of it.

Also, just because I hate posts with no images, here are some pictures I took out of car windows.

Broken barns, man. This country is full of them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under books, scenery, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.