If you're a comics aficionado, you know to what the title of this essay is referring. In case you're not: a 'gutter' is the space between panels of a comic. The notion of 'blood in the gutter' refers to the fact that panel comics rely on our mind's sense of closure to supply missing actions between panels – and to provide contextual connections. Here's an example:

What's going on in this comic, judging from the first panel? Read on.

The 'camera' panned out, and we have a different story going on. How do cartoonists get away with this, which they do all the time?

Closure. If our minds couldn't make sense of fragmentary glimpses into things, we'd be up a creek when it comes to understanding reality. Cartoonists take advantage of our innate mental skills to tell us stories using still images. And yes, you've been doing this all the time, and didn't even know it was a Thing, so feel clever.

So what does that mean to writers? We're writing narrative, right? The reader doesn't need to use that closure thing, right?

Wrong. We do that all the time in writing. We don't tell everything. We tell just enough for the reader to guess the rest.

In this snippet from 1949, Perry Mason is napping in his office one evening. He is awakened by a young woman clambering around on his fire escape. The wind is blowing, so she's having Marilyn Monroe issues. But there's more than that going on, as we shall read.

Mason swung on leg out of the office window.

The girl sensed the threat of that motion. She started slowly down the fire escape. Her right hand made a quick, flinging gesture. A metallic object caught the light rays and glittered, then ceased to glitter. She struggled again with her skirts.

Writers can do more with that gutter business than cartoonists can. You see how detective writer Erle Stanley Gardner clues us in to what's suspicious about that woman on the fire escape. We're pretty sure she threw away a gat. Whose gat it was, why she was throwing it away, where it ended up, what happened to it next, are probably questions that will be answered in the course of The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom.

If those questions weren't going to be answered, we would probably be reading a novel by somebody else.

We can't write second-by-second, complete descriptions of reality. If we did, they would be really, really boring. They'd also be like a map of the universe on a scale of one-to-one: impossibly unwieldy and utterly useless. We don't want to do all the describing. We don't want to do all the work. It's no good unless this is an interactive exercise, this writing-and-reading business. Our job is to arrange the fragments so the reader can do the work of reconstructing a tale in their heads.

Want to get some exercise? Find one of your favourite television series on your streaming service. Rewatch an episode, so you can pay attention to how it's put together. If you particularly like this series, there's a reason, and it might be the way the story is put together.

As you watch, keep notes. List scenes. Note down what we see in each scene: where it takes place, what happens there, who's in it. When the episode is over, write down the major events. Now write down what you learned about the characters that was new. Figure out if there are themes in play, and what they are. See if you can identify places where the writer/producer/showrunner/director/actors have made you do the work, and how you did it.

Example:

Breaking Bad Episode: Caballo sin Nombre

Episode opens with Walter White driving down the desert highway singing along to the radio, which is playing 'I've been through the desert on a horse with no name…' He is stopped by a highway policeman and ticketed for driving with a badly cracked windscreen. Walt becomes incensed at this injustice, because the windscreen was damaged by debris falling from the collision of two airplanes, which took place above his suburban neighbourhood and traumatised the community. [Walt is outraged, in spite of the fact that he bears a great deal of the blame for this, the 50th-largest air disaster of all time. By withholding aid, he allowed a young woman to choke to death on her own vomit while in a drugged stupor: the anguished father was the air traffic controller who made the fatal error.]


[After various misadventures too tedious to list here] Walter is in the shower at his home. He is singing, 'I've been through the desert on a horse with no name.' In his bedroom, two quite frightening men are sitting side by side on the bed, facing the bathroom. One of them is holding a very shiny and very sharp ax. They are the Salamanca Cousins, tough hombres with silver skulls on the ends of their pointy cowboy boots. They, too, have been through the desert, not on a horse, but in a hay truck. They killed all the illegal immigrants in the hay truck, as well as the coyote driver. Then they set fire to the hay truck. They are on a mission of vengeance: we know, because we have seen them heap pesos at the shrine of Santa Muerte, and show her their sketch of the hated Heisenberg. Unfortunately, Walter White, who is now singing in the shower, is Heisenberg.


When White comes out of the shower, the men are gone. Fortunately, during the episode we have seen Mike Ehrmantraut bug the Whites' house, then listen in, then call his boss Gustavo Fring, who then texts the Cousins with the single word 'Pollos', and because we have been paying attention and know a little Spanish, we've completely understood all of this – as surely as a 13th-century listener would know exactly why Sir Lancelot was doing whatever he was doing.


But boy, the writing on this show is clever. Sir Lancelot, eat your heart out.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

09.03.20 Front Page

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