The decision to make Rob Moore a bad guy from the start had huge ramifications for how I was going to tell the story, both good and bad. It helped explained why his father would refuse to help him in his greatest time of need, but it also created a challenge for me in terms of when the reveal to the reader he was evil.
This led to monumental change in the structure of Dig Down: telling the story across two alternating timelines.
My concern with making Rob bad was that if the reader knew everything there was to know about him at the start of the story, namely how he came to his father’s doorstep begging for his help, that they might be so turned off by what he did to Preston and the aide that they might put the book down forever. While this action never wavered, I felt the book’s audience would still stick it out if he was overall a nice guy who found himself in a desperate situation. Although it’s not an apples to apples comparison, Crime and Punishment comes to mind.
It was at this point that I decided to change the story’s structure to flash back and forth between what happened once Rob stepped inside Preston’s townhouse, and everything that happened after he left. This opened up a lot of possibilities that I don’t think would have been options had I stuck to telling the story chronologically.
It allowed me to delve into Rob and Preston’s relationship a lot deeper than I’d originally intended. The exchange between father and son was originally going to be surface level and last for a scene. By breaking it up so that it consisted of half the chapters, it really allowed me to explore their relationship, and by extension, Rob’s shady past and how he came to arrive at his estranged father’s doorstep.
I was also able to pace the story the way I wanted to. Instead of a potentially long scene between father and son being followed by a frenetic pace in which Rob is fleeing from one deadly circumstance after another, I could still keep that intensity up, but give the readers a chance to catch their breath but still hit them with emotional haymakers between Rob and Preston.
Changing the structure to alternating timelines didn’t solve all the challenges I would face in writing Dig Down. It presented all new challenges that needed to be overcome, which I will get into next week.