What was Hemingway's writing style called?

Iceberg theory, or the theory of omission. The canonical statement of it is the passage in Death in the Afternoon where Hemingway compares a story to an iceberg that carries most of itself under water, and the visible part holds up only because the rest is down there. Two other names get attached to the same prose. The journalistic style points at his years on newspapers. It explains the plain nouns and says nothing about why a scene withholds its own meaning. The hard-boiled label comes over from crime fiction, from Dashiell Hammett and the writers around him, and it reads his restraint as toughness rather than as a decision about what a story keeps back. Take the first name and you go looking for the fact that left the page. The other two describe the surface and stop there.

How did Ernest Hemingway build depth into stories where little seems to happen?

He keeps one fact out and makes everything else depend on it. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is the cleanest case in the stories. A wounded buffalo comes out of the grass, Margot fires from the car, her husband dies of that shot, and whether she meant to hit him is left open on purpose. Everything else is specific: her money, the lion Macomber ran away from the day before, the night his wife spent in the guide's tent, the car the two of them shoot from. Depth comes out of the ratio. A fully furnished surface with a single hole in a load-bearing place, and a reader who spends the story pressing on it.

How can writers use the iceberg theory without confusing the reader?

Withhold the interpretation and keep the orientation. Orientation is cheap. Readers put up with not knowing what a scene means, and they stop reading when they cannot tell who is present, where they are and what they want in the next minute. The Old Man and the Sea gives you the proportion: the physical world is all on the page, and nothing in the book explains what an old man losing his fish is supposed to signify. Run a pass over your own draft with two marks, one for lines that establish the situation and one for lines that explain its meaning. Cut from the second set. If you marked almost nothing in the first set, you have found the actual problem.

What made Hemingway's writing so good?

He spends his knowledge on the part of the story he leaves out, and he cuts the sentence until one ordinary word has to carry what a paragraph carries elsewhere. Plainness is the constraint under all of it. A constraint raises the value of every choice left. The demand splits into three parts: a sentence has to be accurate inside the story's own world, it has to be true emotionally, and it must not carry one extra word. The third part is what produces the intensity. With the ornament gone, one word can hold weight it could not have held in a decorated sentence, which is how the word "pretty" carries the aimlessness of a whole generation at the end of The Sun Also Rises, and a definite article holds a man apart from the bed he lies in. Where Fitzgerald would reach for an image, Hemingway leaves the noun bare and lets its position do the work. None of this requires short sentences. It requires that no word sit idle.

What can writers learn from Ernest Hemingway's dialogue?

Write the conversation the people would have, not the one the plot wants. His characters talk past the subject, repeat themselves, ask about drinks, and the pressure shows up in the shape of the evasion rather than in a confession. One detail is worth more here than the general lesson. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he renders the Spanish of the guerrillas into an English of "thou" and formal, slightly archaic word order, a language that exists only on his page, built to carry the feel of the original. The dialogue produces a sense of speech and it was invented, so handle your own as a made object with a job, not as a transcript.

What is an example of a Hemingway style of writing?

The Old Man and the Sea opens with one. "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." Read what that sentence declines to do. It joins its clauses with "and" instead of ranking them, where Faulkner would subordinate half of them and tell you which half matters. It gives you a count of the days and no adjective about bad luck, and it leaves the word for the old man's loneliness to you, although "alone" sits right there in the middle of it. Write the same information the ordinary way and you get a discouraged old fisherman who had suffered a long run of misfortune, which explains the situation and hands a reader nothing to do. The distance between those two versions is the style.

Fiction

Ernest Hemingway Writing Style

Born July 21, 1899 – Died July 2, 1961

Analysis by Draftly's editorial team · Updated August 21, 2026

Hemingway's style has a name, iceberg theory, and the omitted middle is the method. Cut the feeling word, keep the sensory fact, and a reader will fill the gap harder than you could have written it.

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Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Ernest Hemingway: voice, themes, and technique.

Ernest Hemingway's writing style is called iceberg theory, or the theory of omission: he keeps the load-bearing fact off the page and builds the rest of the scene so a reader feels the place where it should have been. The iceberg passage is usually quoted for its first half. Here is that half, from Death in the Afternoon: "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." And here is how the same passage ends: "A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." That second line is the one that costs money. What he describes is not a way of writing short. It is a way of spending knowledge on the part of the story you decide not to print.

The label on the paperbacks says tough and terse. A page-long sentence out of Green Hills of Africa is no less characteristic, and the long unpunctuated chains that open A Farewell to Arms make the same argument. He wrote long when the material asked for it. What holds across the work is the refusal to interpret, so a reader who wants to know what a scene means has to assemble it out of the physical record.

That trade is why he is worth studying and why he is so easy to copy badly. Leave out a thing you have decided and its weight stays in the room. Leave out a thing you have not decided, and the page goes soft in the exact spot where the pressure was supposed to be.

How to Write Like Ernest Hemingway

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Ernest Hemingway.

1
Start with one true sentence, then keep moving
The credo comes from A Moveable Feast: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." The same passage says what he did to get there. He cut the scrollwork and the ornament out of an elaborate opening and threw it away, and the first true simple declarative sentence left standing became the start. That is why it works as a first move. One true sentence eliminates half the available alternatives, and the sentence after it is made by the one in front of it. The rule needs a warning attached before you try it tonight. Taken strictly it will keep you on sentence one until morning, so draft through lines you know are wrong and come back for them with a knife.
2
Write down what you are leaving out
Before you prune a scene, write the omitted fact on a separate line, in one sentence, in the plainest words you own. If you cannot finish that sentence, you have found the difference between an iceberg and a hole. The fact stays out of the draft and beside it, as the thing every visible detail has to stay consistent with. Vargas Llosa's condition for the whole technique is that the silence has a definite influence on the explicit part of the story, which gives you a second test. Name the sentence on the page that changes because of what you removed. If no sentence changes, you did housekeeping.
3
Give the scene a job and a clock
The withheld material sits under a surface that stays completely legible. In "The Killers" you get the lunchroom, the hour, the two men in overcoats too tight for them, the order they place, the cook tied up in the kitchen. The why is missing and nothing else is missing. Copy that arrangement: name a physical task, put a limit on the time available, and let the concealed matter press up through the task. A scene with a job can afford a secret. A scene without one turns to fog the moment you start cutting, and then readers report being bored when what they mean is that they were lost.
4
Trade each abstract noun for a thing in the room
Search the draft for shame, grief, fear, rage and every other name for a feeling. Sink the pain into the physical world instead, because the abstraction does the reader's work for them and empties the page, while a concrete thing invites them to bring their own history to it. The last page of For Whom the Bell Tolls does this at full stretch. Robert Jordan lies behind a tree with a broken leg and a submachine gun, waiting for an officer to ride into range, and what the book gives you at the end is his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest. Not one word for what he feels about dying.
5
Read it aloud and re-cut for the ear
The repetition in this prose runs close to the biblical kind, of words, of images, of sentence shapes, and the ear judges it better than the eye. Test one of your own paragraphs out loud. Join a run of actions with "and", take out the commas, and listen for whether the sequence picks up a forward pull or flattens into a list. Then stop the chain dead with a short sentence and hear what the stop does to the sentences behind it. Keep whichever version your ear prefers, even when the tidier version is the one you were taught to hand in.

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Style

Breakdown of Ernest Hemingway's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Is the bare style any good, or does it only look easy? Take the two registers apart and the answer gets specific. The first is a chain. In A Moveable Feast the cafe sentence runs "The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus" and keeps going without a comma, so the leaves and the wind and the bus arrive in one movement rather than in an order somebody has already sorted for you. Nothing there is subordinate to anything. The sentence declines to rank the rain against the traffic and hands the ranking to you, and the same chain drives Cormac McCarthy's long sentences, so the device outlived the reputation for short ones. The second register is the flat verdict of four or five words. It lands because the chain in front of it flattened the ground first. The Sun Also Rises ends on six of them, "Isn't it pretty to think so?", and the line carries the whole novel because everything Jake wanted and did not get sits behind it. Out of the book that line is nothing. There is the case for the style and the case against it at once. The interpretive work moves to the reader, and the failure is quiet: a bare line in a thin scene reads like a writer with nothing to say, and it reads that way for pages before anybody can be sure. Practise the alternation rather than the length.

Vocabulary Complexity

The words are ordinary. The load they carry is not, and that gap is where imitation usually fails. His nouns come out of the working world, boats and bottles and rooms, and the verbs stay ordinary enough to disappear. Watch what a definite article does: a man who "would lie in the bed" is held separate from the thing he lies in, where "lie in bed" would have folded him into it. Some of the flattest lines are weather and nothing more, and a reader who goes hunting symbols in "It was raining" is doing work the sentence did not ask for. Read the weather as weather.

Tone

Cold is the wrong word for it. The narrator keeps his voice level while the people in front of him lose things, and the level voice is the pressure. The method has a name, litotes, the old figure of saying less than the case, and the rule under it is that the writer sets the scene so precisely that the reader arrives at fear or loneliness without ever being handed the noun. "Out of Season" is the clean demonstration of that. Hemingway took the guide Peduzzi's suicide out of the story, and the cut holds because the humiliation that drives him to it stays on the page, drink by drink and snub by snub. Showing the death would have overdramatised the story. Restraint of that kind costs the character something, which is why it reads as dignity instead of indifference. What gets withheld from the reader is the interpretation, and only that.

Pacing

He runs a scene at the speed of the body in it. In The Old Man and the Sea the fight with the marlin advances through the things Santiago has to do about it: the line laid across his back, the left hand cramping shut, the raw place where the cord bites, the raw fish chewed because he has to eat something. Time passes at the rate of work. Nothing in the sequence gets summarised out of the way, which is why the days on the water read long. Then the sharks arrive, one and then more, and the tempo changes with no announcement at all, because the tasks have changed from taking to defending. The return is quick. A skeleton lashed alongside the skiff, a boy who sees the old man's hands and cries, and no paragraph explaining what any of it added up to. Pace here is a function of what the character has to attend to next, and that lever works in any genre on any material.

Dialogue Style

"Hills Like White Elephants" is the standard exhibit and it earns the position. A man and a girl drink at a station bar in Spain and negotiate an operation the story declines to name even once. What they discuss instead is the hills, the beaded curtain, the drinks, the bags at their feet. The opening explains why the evasion works. The place is the lungs of the scene, and without a real bar and a real train coming, the two of them would have nowhere to breathe and nothing to hide behind. Notice the tags. Most of the speech in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" carries no tag at all and the reader still knows who is talking, because the two waiters want different things and their diction splits along that difference. Read either story out loud with somebody else and you will hear how much of the talk is two people managing each other.

Descriptive Approach

Count the repeated words on the first page of "In Another Country" and the method becomes visible. The fall is cold, the wind comes down from the mountains, the game hangs outside the shops with snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind in their tails. None of it is scenery. Each fact limits what the men can do next, which is the difference between a detail that works and one that decorates. That pattern works as a set of hooks that ties the season to death without the word death appearing anywhere. Hemingway also keeps writing "the hospital" where a pronoun or a synonym would be the tidier choice, because the hospital is the centre of these men's days. The chestnuts warm in a pocket carry a comparison to the promise of life that he declines to make out loud. His stated aim, in the thigh-bone passage of Death in the Afternoon, was to give the experience rather than depict it, and description is the place where that ambition either holds or quietly gives up.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Ernest Hemingway uses across their work.

Delete or defer

Two settings on the same instrument. A fact can go out of the story for good, which is Hemingway's habit, or it can be moved out of sequence and handed over later, which is what a mystery does with the murderer. Vargas Llosa keeps the permanent case and the deferred one apart because they ask different things of a reader. A deferred fact buys suspense and pays it back at the end. A deleted fact buys permanent participation, since the reader has to keep supplying the missing piece and can be wrong about it for life. Decide which one you are doing. Writers who cut without deciding produce the deferred version by accident and then feel obliged to explain everything in a last scene.

The neighbour sentence

A flat declarative takes its force from the line beside it. A bare count of the dead, "only seven thousand died of it", is inert on its own and terrible in position. This is the part imitators cannot lift, because the sentence they admired was not built to stand by itself. Tune them in pairs. That habit also explains a common disappointment, which is that a page of quotable lines usually reads worse than a page with two plain ones and a hinge between them.

Give the experience, not the report

The aim is stated in the thigh-bone passage of Death in the Afternoon. Writing should hand over the experience rather than describe it from outside, and the difference shows up in what you choose to record. A report gives you the conclusion the senses reached, so the room was frightening and the man was brave. The experience gives you the sequence a body goes through in the order it goes through it, which means you have to know that order, whether it comes from a bullring or a hospital corridor or a boat, at a level of detail no adjective can fake. This is the tool that keeps his omissions from reading as evasion.

Said, with no adverb

The tag stays invisible. Look at the close of The Sun Also Rises: "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" No adverb follows "I said", and the flat tag is what lets the question land. Elmore Leonard later hardened that discipline into a rule about never reaching for a verb other than "said". Here is the diagnostic that makes it usable. When a line seems to need "bitterly" or "hesitantly" propped against it, the bones of the line are weak, and the adverb is covering for dialogue that has not earned its tone. Repair the line. Then the tag can go back to doing nothing, which is the whole of its job.

The gap as a bet on the reader

Every omission is a wager that somebody you will not meet does the work. The space between the sentences is where a reader comes in with a story of their own, and the amount of credit Hemingway extends to that reader is the whole of the gamble. The nerve here is technical and not a matter of temperament, because the only alternative to trusting a reader is the explanatory sentence, and the explanatory sentence releases the pressure you spent a whole scene building. The payoff is equivalency, reader and writer standing at the same level.

Carve the fragment out of the whole

You publish a piece of the story and imply the rest of it. Vargas Llosa puts a writer in front of a cube containing everything that could be told and hands him a chisel, and the hidden fact is one of the chisels. "Hills Like White Elephants" is a carving of exactly that kind: one wait at one station, two drinks, a train that has not come, and behind all of it a relationship with a history and a probable future the story declines to enter. The order of operations matters. Know the block first and then choose where to cut, because a writer who starts cutting in order to find out what the story is will take out a load-bearing wall.

Literary Devices Ernest Hemingway Uses

Literary devices that define Ernest Hemingway's style.

The hidden fact

The load-bearing information leaves the story and the rest of it is built to lean on the space. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes's wound is at no point stated. It arrives through a telling silence, through what he does not do and what other people step around, until the reader has effectively imposed the condition on the character. Vargas Llosa attaches a warning to the device. The silence cannot be arbitrary. It has to be felt as an absence and to exert a definite influence on the visible story, or what you have is not an iceberg but missing material, and readers will read that as carelessness rather than as depth.

The ambiguous "it"

Omission comes down to a single word. "It all took a long time" is how "Indian Camp" handles the caesarean the boy hears with his eyes shut, and "She had to have it but it frightened her" is how "Up in Michigan" handles an assault. The empty pronoun is the exactly right word here, because the reader has to supply the referent and is inside the event the moment he does. The same pronoun carries the void of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", where the old waiter knows that it all was nada. Test your own drafts by asking what the pronoun in your vaguest sentence is standing in for, and answer in writing. This one costs nothing to type and everything to earn, since an "it" with no decided fact behind it is only vagueness with better manners.

Repetition with one word changed

He repeats the word where school teaching demands a synonym, then alters one element and lets the alteration do the work. The word "shadow" comes back over and over inside one sentence about a kingfisher, which lets the shadow of the war sit in a fishing scene without being mentioned. The same move runs through "Cat in the Rain", where the phrase "in the rain" comes back until flat weather talk turns into something charged. The sharpest case is the close of "Up in Michigan", where a mist already described returns as a cold mist, and that one added adjective delivers the ending. The pattern has to be built before the variation can register.

Double-voiced reassurance

Hemingway has this one in mint condition. A stoic character quiets his own frightened self by heartily quieting somebody else. The dying man surrounded by attendants says, "Hey. I'm all right." Who is he talking to, if not himself? The line has been aimed at the wrong listener, and the reader hears the fear in it because of the misdirection rather than in spite of it. That is how a page of flat dialogue can carry panic with no access to anyone's interior. The device works only while the character stays unaware of what he is doing.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Ernest Hemingway.

Chopping the sentences and calling it a style

The staccato is the exception in his work rather than the pattern. The parodies fall flat for one reason worth naming, which is that the parodist is not working with the omitted thing. Take "Big Two-Hearted River". Those short flat sentences about the coffee and the tent and the grasshoppers carry the weight of what Nick declines to think about, and lifted out of that pressure the identical sentences are a camping manual. Sentence length is the visible residue of a decision made earlier, so make the decision first.

Cutting the parts you had not settled yet

Hemingway named this failure himself, and it is the one imitators reach first. Cut a fact you know and the reader feels its shape through the surrounding detail. Cut a question you were avoiding and you get a soft patch, which turns up in feedback as a reader who cannot say what the scene was about. The symptom is specific and worth learning. Readers rarely complain that a passage was too spare. They complain that they could not tell what mattered, and the fix is upstream of the prose, in whatever you had not yet decided about the people in the room.

Reading the flatness as coldness

Take the feeling words out of a draft in which the characters have nothing at risk and the result is not restraint. It is furniture. His characters are under load inside the scene itself, and the load is legible from the first paragraph. Harry lies on a cot in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" with a gangrenous leg, quarrelling with his wife about her money and his talent, going back over the stories he did not write, and the text keeps a plain ledger of that waste. Restraint means the narrator declines to summarise the loss. It does not mean the character has nothing to lose, and a scene with nothing to lose will read as sterile however clean the sentences are.

Copying the pose instead of the discipline

The hard-boiled voice is the easiest thing to take and the least useful. The prose creates a sense of realism while the language itself is anything but realistic, invented rather than overheard, and that cuts against the whole imitation project. Copy the toughness and you inherit a manner. Copy the discipline and you get the thing that made the manner possible, and you will probably end up sounding like somebody else, which is the evidence that it worked.

Books

Explore Ernest Hemingway's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Ernest Hemingway's writing style and techniques.

What was Hemingway's writing style called?: Iceberg theory, or the theory of omission. The canonical statement of it is the passage in Death in the Afternoon where Hemingway compares a story to an iceberg that carries most of itself under water, and the visible part holds up only because the rest is down there. Two other names get attached to the same prose. The journalistic style points at his years on newspapers. It explains the plain nouns and says nothing about why a scene withholds its own meaning. The hard-boiled label comes over from crime fiction, from Dashiell Hammett and the writers around him, and it reads his restraint as toughness rather than as a decision about what a story keeps back. Take the first name and you go looking for the fact that left the page. The other two describe the surface and stop there.
How did Ernest Hemingway build depth into stories where little seems to happen?: He keeps one fact out and makes everything else depend on it. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is the cleanest case in the stories. A wounded buffalo comes out of the grass, Margot fires from the car, her husband dies of that shot, and whether she meant to hit him is left open on purpose. Everything else is specific: her money, the lion Macomber ran away from the day before, the night his wife spent in the guide's tent, the car the two of them shoot from. Depth comes out of the ratio. A fully furnished surface with a single hole in a load-bearing place, and a reader who spends the story pressing on it.
How can writers use the iceberg theory without confusing the reader?: Withhold the interpretation and keep the orientation. Orientation is cheap. Readers put up with not knowing what a scene means, and they stop reading when they cannot tell who is present, where they are and what they want in the next minute. The Old Man and the Sea gives you the proportion: the physical world is all on the page, and nothing in the book explains what an old man losing his fish is supposed to signify. Run a pass over your own draft with two marks, one for lines that establish the situation and one for lines that explain its meaning. Cut from the second set. If you marked almost nothing in the first set, you have found the actual problem.
What made Hemingway's writing so good?: He spends his knowledge on the part of the story he leaves out, and he cuts the sentence until one ordinary word has to carry what a paragraph carries elsewhere. Plainness is the constraint under all of it. A constraint raises the value of every choice left. The demand splits into three parts: a sentence has to be accurate inside the story's own world, it has to be true emotionally, and it must not carry one extra word. The third part is what produces the intensity. With the ornament gone, one word can hold weight it could not have held in a decorated sentence, which is how the word "pretty" carries the aimlessness of a whole generation at the end of The Sun Also Rises, and a definite article holds a man apart from the bed he lies in. Where Fitzgerald would reach for an image, Hemingway leaves the noun bare and lets its position do the work. None of this requires short sentences. It requires that no word sit idle.
What can writers learn from Ernest Hemingway's dialogue?: Write the conversation the people would have, not the one the plot wants. His characters talk past the subject, repeat themselves, ask about drinks, and the pressure shows up in the shape of the evasion rather than in a confession. One detail is worth more here than the general lesson. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he renders the Spanish of the guerrillas into an English of "thou" and formal, slightly archaic word order, a language that exists only on his page, built to carry the feel of the original. The dialogue produces a sense of speech and it was invented, so handle your own as a made object with a job, not as a transcript.
What is an example of a Hemingway style of writing?: The Old Man and the Sea opens with one. "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." Read what that sentence declines to do. It joins its clauses with "and" instead of ranking them, where Faulkner would subordinate half of them and tell you which half matters. It gives you a count of the days and no adjective about bad luck, and it leaves the word for the old man's loneliness to you, although "alone" sits right there in the middle of it. Write the same information the ordinary way and you get a discouraged old fisherman who had suffered a long run of misfortune, which explains the situation and hands a reader nothing to do. The distance between those two versions is the style.

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