World Forge Friday: The Iceberg
Applying the Iceberg Model of Culture to Your Story
Today’s writing/world-building prompt is about the occult. I am using the word broadly here, going back to its original Latin meaning: the occult is “that which is hidden or concealed from view”.
What is hidden from view, in your fictional world? What lies beneath the surface, waiting to destroy the unwary or uninitiated?
This prompt can work well for for any genre, but it does best with genres that depend on hidden truths. Horror, thriller, crime, drama and mystery plots are often built on dark secrets that the protagonists can only reveal at the end, after a lot of work.
Here’s how to use this prompt:
Step One: Imagine a character who is an outsider, a stranger to the milieu you’ve created. If it’s a family, this person is a recent addition by marriage/adoption. If it’s a household or building, they just moved in. If it’s a workplace, they were just hired. You get the picture.
Step Two: Imagine the top 10% of the story’s iceberg. What details of this new situation are superficial, close to the surface, easy for your protagonist to see? What jumps out at them on the first day, navigating their new environment? What is the immediate input of their five senses—sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste? What strange customs or quirks are obvious from the jump?
Step Three: Now imagine the other 90% of the iceberg—in particular, the jagged parts that could tear passing ships apart. What does your character NOT know, that the natives around them DO know, which might be necessary for survival? What rules are unspoken, but always followed by the locals? What taboos are learned early? And what will the consequences be for your character when they unknowingly, (perhaps innocently, or with the best of intentions), break the rules of this world and plunge down into the freezing water?
To give this prompt a little context, my educational background is in Anthropology, and the metaphor for this exercise comes from Edward T. Hall’s Iceberg Model of Culture, first proposed in 1976. Hall’s concept was simple, but it was subversive for its time. It has taken on a life of its own in pop culture since the ‘70’s; I often see it used in business/work settings to break down a “company culture” and explain how difficult it is to bring new people into an established team.
What Hall was saying, when he compared culture to an iceberg, is that only 10% of any human society is really visible to outsiders. The remaining 90% is hidden from view, inaccessible.
The deep truth of a culture is known only by those who are actually part of it, raised in it from birth. This occult mass beneath the surface is made up of beliefs and assumptions, values and perceptions that are subconscious or semiconscious, and very difficult to change or even to articulate, at times. Outsiders, even those who stick around for a significant length of time, will never see the vast, jagged bulk of the iceberg under the water. They just putter around on the surface, taking pictures and making notes, and then leave to write their papers.
The reason the idea was subversive for its time (and may remain so even now) is that the vast majority of anthropologists ARE outsiders to the cultures they study. Hall’s theory was that 95% of all Anthropology is pretty shallow stuff—it’s a science of superficial observations made by people who never really share the deeper realities of the cultures they try to describe.
You could say the same about a lot of world-building in speculative fiction. Writers often take great joy in giving their worlds all sorts of easily observed detail—bright bustling marketplaces, magical universities, customs and linguistic quirks, passages from history books, etc..
But the difference between bad or mediocre world-building and really good world-building is whether your story drills down into that hidden 90%.
This is especially true of any story that relies on drama. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a mundane tale about a suburban family or a surreal novel about a haunted asylum on the hill. In Gothic fiction, you drill down into the dark and sticky webs of shame that bind households and institutions together. In science fiction, you might find the forbidden power source hidden in the bowels of a space station, or the secret agenda of the corrupt authorities that send a crew of heroes on a suicide mission. In fantasy, it’s the horrifying price of the magic that animates the world or the dreadful history that has been suppressed and erased to keep the people of the present cocooned in blissful ignorance.
Regardless of genre, the jagged edges of the iceberg are always really interesting and they make for great stories. If you’re a writer or a game developer working on a fictional setting, they’re worth thinking about.
That’s it for this week! I hope that this little game and the notes have been fun. If you have anything to share in the comments, I’d love to hear from you. And you can always request other topics!
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