The legendary writer Ernest Hemingway once said he merely cut vein and let it bleed. I believe what he meant is that he wrote at high speed, letting his thoughts gush onto the page. But he didn’t end there. Quality does not come with speed. It comes in editing, and cutting, and adding, and rearranging, and reshaping. Even in reimagining.
Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times before he was satisfied, according to media. Several more versions were found after he died.
What we initially pour onto the page usually does not become a good story until we mop up the blood and bind the wounds of our prose. The very secret of writing well is to prune back the chaotic stream of thought until you reach the hidden meaning beneath.
Hemingway called his style the iceberg theory: the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight.[197] The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the “theory of omission”. Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing (such as Nick Adams fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River”) though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface (Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about anything else).[198]
If a writer of prose knows enough of 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. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
Keep refining.
