After editing hundreds of manuscripts over my career, I've finally identified the single biggest gap between good writing and truly great writing. It all comes down to what the author DOESN'T say. 🤐 Ernest Hemingway called it the "iceberg theory" — also known as the theory of omission. He believed that a story's text should focus on the surface details: the plot action, the dialogue, the characters, the setting. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Everything else — the deeper themes, emotional nuances, and meaning — should sit BELOW the surface. They should be felt by the reader, but not explicitly stated on the page. And that aligns exactly with the biggest mistake I see in amateur manuscripts: being too literal or on-the-nose. Newer authors tend to spell out every emotion, hit the reader over the head with the theme, and don't trust them to pick up on any nuance. We'll see a heated argument followed by three paragraphs of the protagonist explaining exactly how furious and heartbroken they are — as if the reader didn't just witness the scene firsthand. The MORE you explain something to the reader, the LESS they actually feel it. It's the same experience as having someone explain a joke. The moment it's broken down, it stops being funny. Take this example passage from Twilight: "His white shirt was sleeveless, and he wore it unbuttoned, so that the smooth white skin of his throat flowed uninterrupted over the marble contours of his chest; his perfect musculature no longer merely hinted at it behind concealing clothes. "He was too perfect, I realized with a piercing stab of despair. There was no way this godlike creature could be meant for me." She notices the "the marble contours of his chest" and "his perfect musculature," so it then feels unnecessary for her to call him "too perfect" and "godlike" in her internal reflection. We get it. Restating her admiration feels heavy-handed and is a large part of why Bella is so often critiqued as one-dimensional and superficial. So try this exercise right now: Pull up your manuscript and find an emotionally climactic scene. Highlight every sentence where you're over-explaining your character's emotions or being too literal. Delete those lines. Then read the scene again. I bet it lands so much stronger without them. 9 times out of 10, the scene was already doing the work — you just needed to get out of its way.