Ernest Hemingway

" And he most certainly knew exactly what he was doing. It was through his prose that he was able to develop the "organic" or natural action and create his characters. He even developed a principal during his years as an author to describe the format of his prose that he cleverly called "The Iceberg Principle." .
             In a 1958 interview in "The Paris Review" Hemingway described his iceberg principle. .
             "I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is 7/8 of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know then there is a hole in the story." He continued to say, .
             The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of the way they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, etc. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In your writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. .
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             Hemingway was a firm believer in keeping writing "short and to the point." He felt very little need for all the specific details that so many other writers spent so much time on. Hemingway was able to develop his plot and characters with the least amount of description. "The remarkable fact is that in telling as much or as little about the story as he did, Hemingway managed through his complex artistry to use words in such a way that we were allowed to see past them and to glimpse the outlines of the mysterious and probably tragic adventure that the words were not quite about to describe but were also not quite able to conceal.