Before sitting down to finally write Dig Down, one of the first things I had to determine was what illegal activities had Rob gotten involved in. In essence, what had happened that led up to him being in the desperate state he found himself in at the start of the story. I knew I wanted him facing a slew of charges, and wanted him to have a lot of unsavory characters on his tail. But in order for all that to happen, I needed to not only know what he’d done, but more importantly, I needed to know what had led to his involvement in all those crimes.
One of the first things I did was brainstorm all sorts of criminal activities that Rob could’ve gotten mixed up in. From there, I started to rule out things that, while Rob could’ve been capable of being involved in, that he wasn’t going to have done. The crimes I kept helped shape Rob’s character. At the time, I had no idea what Rob did for a living, but being involved in stock manipulation and insider trading determined for me that he was going to be a broker.
Although I wanted him to face a litany of charges, I also needed it to be understandable why he did the things he did. That helped me pare the list of crimes to its final form, though it did lead to another difficult cut. Early on, as a way to explain how he’d come up with the money to rent a car and pay a coyote, I had planned for him to embezzle money from a charity he’d created. The more noble the charity’s goal, the better. Ultimately, I felt this choice might be too inexcusable, and just left the financing of his escape to the money he’d borrowed from the loan shark.
With all that settled, I crafted a personal history for Rob that outlined not only what he did, but the surface level reason for every action, and is as follows:
Rob graduated college feeling his father would have a top job waiting for him at his company. When Preston gave him a junior salesman position, after some initial success making guaranteed sales to his friends, he began to flounder, until Axel, a businessman without morals with friends in Congress, approached him with a lucrative, though illegal, deal. On the verge of being fired, Rob played ball. Through his partnership with Axel, the “Cowboy”, he met Axel’s daughter Vicky, who he fell in love with, and courted by scoring drugs for her. He began to use as well. Needing to support his escalating addiction, he starts pump and dump scams, until the firm’s clientele starts to vanish. Being a regular with dealers, he is approached by the head of a cartel to launder money through the firm, in exchange for drugs and a share of the profits. He feels invincible, until a strong supporter in Congress gets caught with a dead hooker in a very public way. Needing to hush up the Congressman before they can talk, Rob approaches the cartel to assassinate the prisoner. They agree, in exchange for him being a mule for their drugs. When the Congressman dies, the investigation intensifies, and other hookers step forward, incriminating everyone in the operation. Parties involved look to clean house, and that means silencing Rob. Permanently. Parties include Axel, the Congressman, the pimp of the hookers, and the cartel.
This was the initial rundown that I came up with for Rob’s backstory, and after reading the finished product, you can see I made changes along the way. But like a house, the foundation had been laid.
What I needed to do next was dig deeper into Rob’s motivation to help shape his backstory and focus and tighten the story even more. Next week, I dig down deeper into Rob’s reasoning for every bad decision he made.