The tip of the iceberg is an idiom for the part that is seen, with the implication that there’s much more that is hidden. In novel writing, the tip of the iceberg is the part of the story that makes it into print. The rest of the iceberg is all the material the author didn’t include in the final manuscript.
The amount of material that isn’t included is generally much greater than what’s contained in the novel itself. It can consist of research the author did for the story, scenes that were cut, plot lines which were abandoned, and those “extras” that R.J. Crayton identified as the “director’s cut” of the work. Continue reading “The Rest of the Novel-Writing Iceberg”
