Backstory: The Importance of What Isn't Told
When Ernest Hemingway spoke about the dignity of an iceberg being " due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he was speaking about the importance of the part of the story that isn't told. Those nine-eighths underwater are the ballast for the tiny bit that juts up to glisten in the sun. And, more often than not, those nine-eighths are almost entirely composed of one of the most important - and yet sometimes overlooked - facets of any tale. Backstory.
