Exposing the Iceberg: An Exercise in Description and Style
Purpose: This exercise focuses on two skills: writing detailed descriptions and practicing different genres/styles. In most cases, it is best done towards the beginning of the semester, especially for assignments like the Snapshot essay which encourage students to slow down and give detailed accounts of their subject matter. It also allows them to explore how writing in a different genre, style, or tone can shift the content of their writing.
Description: After a lesson about Hemingway’s six-word story and the Iceberg theory, students pick a six-word story from a list and expand on it by filling in their own details. After another brief lesson about style and content, using Queneau’s Exercises in Style, students then rewrite their story in another style or genre.
Suggested Time: a full class (50-minute classes may have to move through the volunteer stages a bit quicker than the 75-minute classes)
Procedure: Begin by writing on the board Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word short story: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” Have a discussion on whether these six words can in fact be considered a story (students often disagree), and ask what genre the story is written in (a classified ad). Lead the class into a conversation about the concept of subtext and ask them to imagine filling in all of the necessary information that the six words elicit. (
Why are the unworn shoes for sale? Who is selling these shoes? Etc.) Then explain the Iceberg theory—the theory of only including the bare essentials as visible in the text and leaving the bulk of the meaning submerged underwater as subtext (I always illustrate with a poorly-drawn iceberg on the board). You might have a brief conversation about the literary advantages to this type of writing but also how rich, detailed description is valuable.
This is when the activity begins. Show them examples of other six-word stories that writers have written, inspired by Hemingway. A large sample can be found here: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html. Read a few aloud and then ask students to choose one to expand on, which will require them to fill in their interpretation of the subtext and provide the detail. After about ten minutes of writing, ask for a few volunteers to read aloud their stories. Even if students choose the same story, they always interpret it and take it in very different directions. When they are done, ask them to go through and simply mark places where, if they had time, they might expand even further with more detail.
Then show them the first few pages of Raymond Queneau’s Exercise in Style, a book which tells the same short, simple story in hundreds of different styles. You can find a pdf of the first part of the book here: altx.com/remix/style.pdf. Talk with students about how the story becomes different depending on how it is written, how even the first instance of the story (notation) is also a style (most of the students tend to think of it as a non-style, as pure content). After this discussion, ask students to rewrite their story in a different style, genre, or tone of their choice. Remind them to consider what new information they might provide that might alter the story to match the new form. After another ten minutes or so, ask for a few volunteers. Ideally, you would have at least one volunteer who read the first time so that the class can see the difference between the two drafts. Wrap up by reviewing once more the different concepts discussed and how these skills relate to their writing assignment(s).