Breaking up Dig Down into alternating timelines was done to serve two purposes. The first was to regulate the pacing of the story, as it starts out with a conversation between Rob and Preston, and then becomes a lethal chase where Rob is pursued by vicious criminals and any wrong move would lead to his immediate death. The second purpose was to hide the nature of Rob’s true character.
While I primarily made the decision to structure Dig Down this way because of the pacing, I also had concerns about how readers would react if the deplorable things Rob did in Preston’s townhouse were the first things they experienced Rob doing. I had a real fear that readers would be so turned off by it they’d put the book down forever. Breaking up the story so that it alternated back and forth between the townhouse and the chase allowed readers to get to know Rob a little better before they realized who he truly was. At that point, the hope was that they’d be invested enough in the story to want to know what happens to him, albeit, their perspective of him and the outcome they hoped for may have shifted.
Writing it this way presented me with another challenge. Every scene now had to be written in a way that you were both cheering every time he made a narrow escape and groaning that he’d eluded his pursuers. The scenes had to be presented in such a way that if someone picked up the book again for a subsequent read through, the reader would be rewarded with tension that still proved engaging, even though they already knew the ending.
My expectation was that at the end of Dig Down, readers would no longer side with Rob, and I wanted to create an experience where if they reread the book, knowing what they now knew about him, that tension in the earlier chapters would still hold up. Hints about Rob’s character are spread throughout the story, I made sure that he doesn’t change as a character from beginning to end, which I believed would help readers maintain their disgust for him if they read the book again. When the audience reread Dig Down, they’d now cheer over things like The Shark holding Rob up at gunpoint, and then grumble “He was so close!” when Rob escape that, or maybe yell “He’s right over there!” when the cops were arresting The Shark.
In order to get this effect, I did my best to inundate the reader with a barrage of close calls. Rob is supposed to be running for his life from many people who all want him dead, so the danger is baked into the premise. By constantly throwing him into harm’s way, regardless of your perception of him, you’ll want to see what happens. Does he squirm free at the last second, of do the walls close in on him for good?
The chase wasn’t the only part of Dig Down I had to structure so that it would hold up to these two conflicting perspectives. Next week, I’ll review how the conversation between Rob and Preston had to be meticulously crafted.