‘Get as weirdly specific as you are able’ has leapt out as some keen writerly advice in my readings these past two weeks, and I’ve been thinking about the phrase ever since. In fact I’ve noticed quite a bit of advice promoting specificity in fiction writing, lately, and have even begun to notice where other writers here on Substack are succeeding with specifics or could benefit from drilling in more on them.
For this week’s post, then, I would like to solicit feedback on a section of my own writing. If you are so inclined, I would very much like any and all feedback that comes to mind on the piece below. But first, a quick aside.
I’ve also been working on a short synopsis for exactly what this yet-to-be-titled story of mine is about. How well do you think this synopsis will hook someone who may be just browsing through? How well do you think it allows someone to just jump in with no other context? Is any part of it awkward?
What makes us human? This question is the obsession of the people of Rust, a city built underground by refugees fleeing a cataclysm that has left the surface of their world uninhabitable. The city thrives, a metropolis of wealth and safety amidst the subterranean darkness, but the deep places of this world are not to be shut out entirely. In this city, the half-seen shapes in the shadows are not merely a figment of the imagination. Rust is a city of lights, but one whose liminal spaces always whispers the dark inverse ‘what makes us inhuman?’
Alright, on to the piece I would like some feedback on.
In my rough draft, this section begins the line “No matter how much Solis tries, he can’t ever seem to get away from the Chasm.” That’s it. That single line, and then the chime and voice announcing their arrival at Fire View station (you’ll see that in the section below) and moving on to going down into the slums.
That’s not very specific.
I decided to dig deeper about why Solis feels he can’t escape the neighborhood he was born into. I’m increasingly realizing there are so many areas in my work where I leave the reader to guess at my assumption about how the world works, rather than give them a way to see the world working that way. For example, I assume one can’t ever escape the Chasm because they are the slums of this fictional city, and escaping poverty is nearly an impossible task—and my single sentence about my main character obliquely voicing that assumption does very little to convey any of that to a reader.
Below, I try to remedy this. I am trying to write so that the reader does not need to guess at my assumptions about the fiction; I’m trying to show them the way this world actually lives, so they can form their own assumptions.
Feel like giving it a read? I would be grateful for any thoughts you care to share. I’ll ask a few specific questions at the end of it.
Detectives Lucas Solis and Moira Ionesco work for the Special Investigations Branch of R-SEC in the subterranean city of Rust. They are trying to find the truth behind a gruesome, occult murder that has taken place in the seaside district. They are still trying to ID the victim, and are heading to the Chasm district—the slums, and where Solis spent his youth—to follow up on a lead.
The automated voice of the throughway announces their next stop, Fire View station, is coming up in a few moments. It’s the main stop for the neighborhood Solis grew up in, but there’s no sense of homecoming for him. No matter how many years it has been, no matter what he has accomplished, going back has only ever filled him with dread. The first time he left, really left, he swore he would never go back. But no matter how hard he tries, circumstance always brings him back. Some cord tied by fate tethers him to these slums—and he’s always known it, known he could never truly leave, no matter what promises he makes himself. He distinctly remembers the moment he realized he would never escape the Chasm.
He was eight years old, and he had just heard the young man in the neighboring apartment murdered.
He still remembers his neighbor’s name, Calen Alito, and how the nineteen year old would cook late at night after coming home from second shift. The layout of the crowded tenements was such that only a thin wall separated Alito’s kitchenette from the cubby where Solis slept alongside his little brother, and Solis used to relish being woken by the quiet clatter of cookware and the muted hum of Alito’s singing. Sometimes he would imagine being in the kitchen with Alito, learning to cook, and other times he would even dare to imagine his parents making something for him and his siblings with easy smiles and songs of their own.
Solis rarely crossed paths with Alito, but he did look up to him. Alito was not like the rest of the people in the crowded tenement complex. Alito did not share his small apartment with anyone else, but had it all to himself. Alito had a job up in the Steps that paid him well, and he hadn’t lost it within a few weeks like Solis’s parents always did. Alito didn’t spend his money on drugs and drink the way Solis’s oldest brother did, and unlike Solis’s older sister, Alito stayed as far away from the gangs as possible.
Solis wanted to be like Alito, because Alito was the only one Solis knew who had a plan to leave the Chasm that was actually working.
One night Solis was woken by shouting from next door. He could hear Alito’s voice, and then two other, louder voices, a man and a woman. This happened every few weeks, and it was always loud. Solis had even heard his parents complain about the fighting waking them up, and it took a great deal of noise to wake them from their indulgences. From his parents complaints he knew the woman’s voice belonged to Alito’s older sister, and the louder man’s voice was the sister’s boyfriend. They were fighting about money. They always fought about money; Alito had some, and Alito’s sister had none.
This night, the fight was worse than any from before. There were a few loud bangs. Two of the bullets went through the wall, leaving two small, dark holes above Solis’s bed. If he or his little brother had been standing up they might have been hit. Solis remembers his little brother crying and his older sister rushing in to check on them—his parents hadn’t been home in days. He remembers the shouting from other tenants in other apartments. He remembers staring at those two bullet holes. He remembers the sadness that felt like a sphere of dark water pressing down on his chest, making it hard to breathe, until it broke apart and poured into him so his whole body felt water-logged, and cold.
He remembers thinking: I’m sorry, Alito. No one can leave here.
The throughway’s chime startles Solis back to the present. The brakes hiss as a computerized voice announces their arrival at Fire View station.
The crowded throughway car slows to a stop, doors sliding open a moment later to let passengers off. Ionesco threads through the dense rush hour crowd, Solis following, doing his best to avoid bumping into anyone in the press of first shifters heading home and second shifters heading to work. The lights in the station are dim, but in the busy hours like this, all of the ambient light from the rubaiyat in people’s skin add additional illumination. Solis passes by a dizzying array of patterns. Here a man in a vest with no shirt displaying a riotous splash of light etched across his torso, like the rings and vortexes of color in polished old growth wood. There a woman bundled up, probably heading to the cold higher up in the Steps, with only a small tracery of light visible across her right cheek and forehead, reminding Solis of the shadows cast by primrose flowers. A group of children rush by, the rubaiyat patterns still growing along with them, a few of them with the lines of light confined still to their torso while for others the light spills out across their limbs.
Ionesco doesn’t lead them to the exit, but instead makes her way over to the station’s eponymous viewing platform. It’s a large, mostly empty space set off from the main concourse. There are public benches, a few flickering infographics along the walls, and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the chasm. A guardrail runs the length of the viewing area to keep people back from the thick glass. Ionesco leans against the rail, choosing a spot well away from anyone else. Solis joins her, gingerly, trying to keep his breath from noticeably quickening. He is not fond of heights.
It’s not exactly clear where the Chasm begins and the Steps end, but most generally consider the line of demarcation to be here at Fire View. From here, one can get their first glimpse of the sea of magma that churns at the bottom of the great fissure the district takes its name from, the molten rock roiling past some twelve hundred meters below. Above them the Steps district rises nearly another fifteen hundred meters to the cold cavern ceiling. In both districts the buildings and walkways are built on ledges, anchored platforms, or directly into the vertical cave walls. The city’s last official count put the number of bridges weaving it all together at one thousand ninety six, some of them onl small suspended footpaths a meter wide and a few meters long, others great spans lined with shops and apartments along their lengths.
Solis remembers someone telling him once that if you jumped from the top and managed to fall the entire way without hitting a bridge, you would have about twenty three seconds in free fall. The thought makes him shudder.
“So can you see it from here?” Ionesco asks.
“See… what?” Solis is confused by her question.
“Your childhood home. Can you see it from here?”
“One or two of them, I think. Never really stayed in one place too long. See that large bridge down there, the metal one? Not the one connecting those tenement clusters, but the one further below it.” He points, directing her attention a ways further down the canyon.
The bridges down below the viewing platform are noticeably shabbier than the bridges up above in Steps, and the further down the Chasm one goes, the less sturdy the bridges—and the buildings, for that matter. Go down far enough, and some of the bridges are nothing more than two ropes, one to walk on and one as guideline to hold onto.
That memory really gets Solis’s heart beating fast. He hated crossing the bridges as a child.
“I see it,” Ionesco says, following his gesture. “The span with that row of apartments and shops on each side, right? That doesn’t look so bad.” Her tone is dubious; nothing in the Chasm looks anything but bad to those used to the nicer parts of the city.
“Yeah, that’s the Kasnet Span. Not a bad street to live on, and the apartments on the span itself are pretty nice. We lived under the bridge, though, about two levels down, along the far wall from here. There’s a little ledge we can’t see from here, the bridge blocks the view, and a warren built into the cliff wall. It was…” he hesitates, glancing at her, but she isn’t looking at him. “It was not a good place.”
“How the hell did a kid from down here make it into SI?” Ionesco mutters under her breath, and Solis isn’t sure he was meant to hear.
Do you think this feels effective as a means of showing what this neighborhood is like? Is it effective in teasing what Solis’s childhood might have been like? Does it feel plausible Solis believes the place is inescapable, even though as an adult, he is only returning their for work?
I’m not sure that piece does enough work for the last question to be a yes, but maybe it provides some scaffolding on which to continue writing about that feeling of inescapability.
Did anything stand out as awkward, or as falling flat?
Was there anything that just didn’t make any sense? Or anywhere you found yourself skimming through and skipping words to get through it faster?
I am also kind of wondering… maybe I didn’t get as “weirdly specific”, emphasis on the weirdly there, as I should have? I’m increasingly thinking that a slow burn build up of the weird is not the right direction to go; rather, it would be better to lay that all out in the early chapters so a reader knows what they are getting into.
Let me know what you think, friends. As always, I cannot overstate how much it means to me to have you here.
This is really beautifully written.
"He remembers the sadness that felt like a sphere of dark water pressing down on his chest, making it hard to breathe, until it broke apart and poured into him so his whole body felt water-logged, and cold." - is one of those lines that captures an unspeakable and overwhelming feeling and mood so well. Just wonderful Ryan.
A few notes, drawing from a poverty perspective, which I've both grown up in and worked professionally in and think about constantly:
1) What looks the same and what looks different based on class in this society? IE: maybe everyone in the society is born with a rubaiyat. But are they different depending on your class somehow (shapes, presentation)? Or maybe everyone equally has one, but the rich shine brighter because they purchase clothing that accentuates it or the poor shine dimmer because they're tired. Or vice versa and wealthy try to make theirs demure and quiet with just edges showing and the poor folks' are brash. This came to mind with the description in the train car
2) Take or leave it as you like for narrative purposes...but I think its important to complicate depictions of poverty. Mixing in a description of a run down neighborhood with a provisional outdoor food-stall overflowing with good smells and a laughing group of eaters. A streetside game.
3) What they know vs what they learned and remember is an interested conversation in depictions like these. if Solis grew up amidst rickety bridges then that's what he knows and would not hate them, unless he had something very specific and terrible that he remembers and associates them with now. This applies more broadly to the tension in the story about escaping poverty and place. Solis can't truly hate the Chasm unless he hates himself or there was a dramatic trauma that forced him to flee it (possible! Was it what happened to Alito? maybe that feeling following that night spurred some dramatic action of some type that projected him out.) If not, then more likely he feels relief at having escaped the consequences and reality of the place, but also alienation because no matter where else he goes he'll not be able to connect with people who don't understand what it's like to grow up in the Chasm, also because in being elsewhere, he alienated himself from the his own community where nobody escapes. A return might mean judgment from his own people in that case and cause its own tension. It could also be a victory tour of the golden one that made it good. I think what the return means and feels like depends on the story Solis tells himself about how he escaped and what the story is in the community about that same event.
This is great! I think this is such a HUGE improvement already over the last version. The district really came to life in my eyes, and I'll say now that I want more of the weird right away. The weird stuff about this setting is so exciting, evocative, and gripping. Don't hide it!
One thing I would mention is to watch out for hedging: "If he or his little brother had been standing up they might have been hit." They WOULD have been hit. They would have died. Whether that is 'true' or not doesn't matter — our memories warp with time, and I can see Solis thinking of it any other way than as a sure thing, right?
Can't wait for more. The memory from Solid really helped characterize him, too, so it's nice to see that double duty being pulled.