The theory of omission
When I was writing my Mexico books — thank you, by the way, if you read any of them — I was often applauded for their sense of place. I even had a reader once send me a picture he snapped of a restaurant in Monterrey, saying, “It’s real!”
Yup, it’s real. And so are most of the details I included in those books. Just enough to tell the reader that it’s okay to let go and allow their imagination to fill in the gaps. They feel secure enough in my handling of the setting to trust me.
Hemingway said it this way:
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 iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
This is often referred to as the Iceberg Theory or (as I prefer) the theory of omission, and I know it works because, well, we just talked about how it works. A net isn’t a solid object, but full of holes, and yet it still catches fish. That’s how writing should be. The useless stuff drains away, but the net of the writer’s detail retains what’s worthwhile: story, setting, and character. The reader does the rest.
Pretty magical, huh?