Hemingway explained his own style only a handful of times in print, and the clearest explanation he ever gave used an iceberg.

The Direct Answer
It's Hemingway's idea that a writer can leave out most of what he knows about a story and the reader will still feel it, as long as the writer understood it well enough to cut it on purpose.
He laid it out in Death in the Afternoon in 1932, comparing the visible part of a story to the one-eighth of an iceberg that sits above water.

The Original Statement, in His Own Words

The fullest statement of it sits in Death in the Afternoon, his 1932 nonfiction book about bullfighting, tucked into a passage that's ostensibly about something else altogether. Hemingway used the bullring to make a point about writing, and the point has outlived the book it appeared in by a wide margin.

If a writer of prose knows enough about 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.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932

Notice the condition buried in that sentence. Omission only works if the writer knows the thing being left out. Cutting material you never understood in the first place just produces a hole where the depth should be. The theory isn't a license for vagueness: know more than you're going to say, then say less than you know.

Where It Started: A Cut Ending in 1923

Death in the Afternoon is where Hemingway named the idea, but he'd been practicing it for nearly a decade by then. He traced it back to a short story called "Out of Season," written in 1923 and first printed that year in Paris in Three Stories and Ten Poems. Looking back on it in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of those Paris years, he described exactly what he'd done to the ending.

I had omitted the end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

That last clause is the whole theory in miniature. The aim is to make a reader feel more than they understood, and that only happens when the writer understood all of it.

The Same Idea, 35 Years Later

When George Plimpton interviewed him for The Paris Review in 1958, Hemingway was still saying the same thing, in almost the same image.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.

Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review, 1958

Thirty-five years separate the cut ending of "Out of Season" from that interview, and the principle never moved. That consistency is part of why the idea has stuck. He held to it as a working method for his entire career.

What It Looks Like on the Page

You can see the theory working in Hemingway's short stories more clearly than in the novels, because the compression is more extreme. Hills Like White Elephants never states what the couple is arguing about. A reader who's paying attention understands anyway, because the dialogue is built by someone who knew exactly what was underneath it and chose which eighth to show. Strip out the unstated subject and the story would collapse into a description of two people arguing about nothing in particular.

The technique is why Hemingway's prose reads as spare without reading as thin. Plenty of minimalist writing feels empty because there's nothing under the surface to imply. Hemingway's omissions work because the seven-eighths he's not showing you are fully worked out in his own understanding of the scene, even if not one word of it makes it to the page. The gap between what's said and what's known is where the story's weight sits.

For the desk, the pencils, and the rest of how a day's writing actually happened, see the full Ernest Hemingway writing routine.

How to Use It in Your Own Draft

The theory is easy to admire and hard to apply, because the instinct of most writers is to explain. A useful way to practice is to work in two passes on the same scene.

In the first pass, write everything. Put the backstory in, name the feeling, have the character say exactly what's wrong. Get the whole iceberg down on the page where you can see it.

In the second pass, find the sentence that states what the scene is really about and cut it. Then cut the lines that only exist to support it. Read what's left and ask whether the tension still comes through. If it does, you've found the eighth worth showing. If the scene goes dead, you cut something the reader needed, so put back the smallest piece that brings it back to life.

Hemingway's condition still applies. This only works on material you understand completely. If you can't write the full version first, you don't know the scene well enough to leave anything out of it yet.

Reading how Ernest Hemingway worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.

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