Before I had the plot of Dig Down set in stone, before I had made up all the characters, there was one thought I had in my head:
The book had to be fast.
If I was going to succeed in creating the sense that Rob was running for his life, it had to feel like obstacles were coming at him so fast he’d never get a chance to catch his breath. Just as he was getting out of one jam, he’d find himself in another, and sometimes, he wouldn’t even get a chance to escape one dire situation before finding himself diving headfirst into the next.
In order to pull this off, that also meant I had to apply this same pace to Rob’s conversation with Preston in the townhouse. While I felt these scenes would contrast nicely with the intense chase sequences they alternated with, if they were too slow and plodding it would be a shock every time the story jumped back to the chase.
I wrote the chapters set in Preston’s townhouse to ensure the scenes kept moving towards the dramatic climax, taking care they didn’t dawdle in their conversation. Although the pace was much slower than Rob’s escape once he leaves Preston’s, the reader would get the sense the story was always driving toward something.
Let’s take a look at Chapter 3:
When he enters the apartment, Rob makes the observation about Preston not having changed a thing when he first walks through the door. Logically, it’s the first thing he’d notice, until he hears his name on the TV. Rob’s face on the television hints to the reader that whatever Rob is running from, it’s made national news. But rather than the two of them going into a conversation about it, or have Rob’s thoughts dwell on his troubles, I have him react to seeing his problems broadcast on the screen by muting the TV. Echoing the style in the chapters where he’s running for his life, I don’t keep him focused on the TV. Only when it’s muted does he realize Preston hasn’t said a word since Rob walked through his front door. This is when I go back to the layout of Preston’s apartment, having Rob make an attempt at small talk to break Preston’s icy mood. The focus shifts between Preston’s apartment and his coldness towards Rob as Rob keeps pausing in the hopes that Preston will talk to him. It’s during one of these pauses that Rob finally notices all the window blinds aren’t drawn, and that Preston’s neighbors can see him, serving as another reminder that he’s running from something.
In summary, I’ve gone from giving a brief description of the interior of Preston’s townhouse, to the revelation that what Rob has gotten involved with is major news, to the frosty relationship between Rob and Preston at the start of the story, to alternating between Preston’s furniture (a way I chose to demonstrate the characterization of Rob and Preston without it being exposition) and Rob’s attempts to repair that broken relationship, to Rob’s realization of his latest problem of being spotted.
This whole sequence occurs in the first five paragraphs. So while this is a slower scene, it follows the spirit of the pace that’s to follow when Rob leaves with what he came for. I’ll be going into more detail about the contents of this chapter, in the coming weeks.