Know the Iceberg. Write the tip.

I find myself saying this phrase a lot when talking about story. (This phrase is not original to me, but I was unable to discover its origin)   Typically about a tenth of an iceberg can be seen above water - the rest of the mass is below the surface.  But it’s the mass below the surface that we humans can’t easily see that actually supports the tip we can see. 

Story is the same way, in a sense.  In order to spin a tale that feels real to the reader or the viewer, you have to know about all the iceberg parts of your story that are below the surface.  Why is your surly innkeeper surly?  The reader may never need to know this, but *you* need to know its because he has bad knees that hurt him every time he walks around, which is why the food here is great but the service is slow and the attitude bad - which your protagonist’s sidekick is well aware of, but the protagonist isn’t, which is why the sidekick always wants to eat at this inn and argues to give the innkeeper a break.  But because the innkeeper is a side character, you don’t have to spell this out for the reader - they can decide for themselves what the character motivations are.

The trick is, if you, the writer, didn’t know these secrets, then the characters would behave differently.  The innkeeper might be polite and average and your sidekick has nothing to say about them.  Not having those little details removes a little bit of color from your world - because now there’s nothing remarkable or memorable about this inn and the characters in it.

The more iceberg you develop below the surface, the more the part that shows will feel real and believable, and the more emotional impact the events of your story will have.  

Do this for as much of your story as you possibly can.  Everything in the real world has tremendous detail that is impossible to replicate in a created world - but the more of it you can create, the more it will affect what you are working on.

There was a sequence Tiffani wanted to put in her book with several Interrogers in it.  (The Interrogers are a kind of secret police in Tigraen)  In her first version of the scene, the Interrogers acted as a group - no matter how many there were, they behaved as one character; while they worked fine, they didn’t have any depth.  And we probably could have left it that way - they aren’t a key element of her story, they’re just present in a couple of scenes.  But, because I had a pair of Interrogers I’d made up for a short story I may someday get around to writing, I passed those two characters along for a cameo in her story.  Since they both at least had some character depth, and motives of their own, it completely changed her scene.  Next revision, the Interrogers were no longer a block of identical characters, but individuals with their own motives and methods that had their own objectives.  The scene because much deeper and more complex, because we knew what was beneath the surface of those characters who only appeared for a single scene.  (At least in that draft).

So, when you can, where you can, add more ice beneath your iceberg.  Know the story that doesn’t make it into the final draft.  See the effects it has on every character in your world.  Create the iceberg, and write the tip!