Since I’ve been talking about rewrites the past few weeks, I thought I would share some of the ways that Dig Down has evolved over the course of writing it. The following weeks of posts will be about the significant changes it went through from concept to publication.
I came up with the idea for Dig Down back in 2011. Two images came to mind, a scene in Reservoir Dogs where Mr. Pink is running from cops, and a scene in Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio was running from pursuers through an alleyway that narrowed to the point where he became stuck and had to tug his way free to keep fleeing. It was these two images that made me want to write a story about a man on the run.
When I asked myself who the man was running from, I thought “Wouldn’t it be interesting if he was running from everyone?” I started coming up with ideas for placeholder characters for who would be after my protagonist, who I was calling Paul at the time (and would eventually become Rob). First, there would be a loan shark (The Shark), just some low level thug who I thought would be good for an initial thrill to set the tone. There would also be a drug dealer (el Volcan), cops who were after him because they were in the pocket of someone in power who was sinister, and a mob boss who would come along later in the story and want him dead (the Sociopath).
And this got me thinking about another idea that I had started drafting 2 years prior. In that story, a degenerate, Buddy, digs up a corpse, Fletch executed by one gang and brings it to be paid by a second gang who put a price on the Fletch’s head before the second gang realized Fletch was already killed. Only Fletch was smuggling diamonds for a third gang, and once word got back to them that Fletch was killed, they start coming after Buddy for their diamonds. And the two gangs that initially wanted Fletch dead go to war with each other and are also after Buddy.
The name I had for this other story back in 2009 was Dig Down Deep. I stopped writing it because although I wanted it to fantastically over the top, I was having a hard time focusing it and moving the story along to where it needed to go. Two years later, when I started getting excited about this idea, I decided this would be the story that bore the name Dig Down Deep, a title that it kept until I finished the mall scene in the first draft, and shortened it to Dig Down.
So the first significant change made during the process was overhauling what Dig Down was even about, digging up a new idea out of the ashes of a failed one.