What We Don't Write

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
Ernest Hemingway

This is one of my favorite quotes about writing and it is one that just about every one of my clients has seen more than once. It’s powerful stuff to think about; what you don’t write is sometimes as powerful as what you do.

My writing partner and I have a psychological thriller we’d written completely from the antagonist’s point of view. We really like our antagonist. She’s crazy but doesn’t realize it and when the larger plot isn’t happening, she visits doctors, has weird, scary visions at work, etc. Nope. An exec at Fox insisted we rewrite the whole draft from the protagonists point of view. We had no choice; these were our marching orders. What we found, though, was that even though we weren’t going to show the antagonist going about her crazy business – it was still happening. So when she walked into a scene with the protagonist, in our minds, she was just returning from a doctor scene, bringing with her the same disappointment, frustration and craziness. We couldn’t show it. But it was happening, and it was affecting our character’s behavior.

In other words, the story you show us in your script is the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole lot more going on under the surface – in the writer’s mind. And this will inform your story. Hemingway was alluding to prose but I still believe it works in translation.

For those Rouge Wavers thinking SUPER but how does today’s blog, nine tenths of which is not making sense to me work in a practical sense? We are talking about character, we are talking about the world of your story. We are talking about what happened in your character’s life a day before the script started. And the things your character feels but does not say. We’re talking about the tune the antagonist hums in the shower when we’re not there to hear it. We’re talking about the silences in-between, the things left unsaid and the scenes we cannot show but that happen nonetheless.

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