With the decision to tell Dig Down across alternating timelines, one challenge this presented was making sure the audience understood where they were in Rob’s attempt to escape with his life. It’s here that the initial draft would look unrecognizable.
There were two things that I did to signify to the reader whether Rob was in Preston’s townhouse, or had already left and was fleeing for his life from the many people who wanted him dead. The first was writing the sections that took place in the townhouse in italics. I thought that this would make them stand out, and the reader would be able to associate, just be seeing a page full of this font, that these were the townhouse scenes. I had it in my head that all italics was the way most authors indicate a flashback scene. As I did some more research after the first few drafts I saw that not only wasn’t this typically done, the reason it was avoided was because it bothered readers.
The second thing I did was separate the two timelines with a title card, although the title cards wouldn’t say ‘Chapter 1’ or ‘Part 2.’ Instead, the title card would read something like ‘The Shark’ or ‘The Cowboy.’ This was actually the reason why so many characters have nicknames in the story, because they would coincide with when they were either introduced or did something of relevance. The first section would’ve been called ‘The Shark’ because that’s when Rob runs into him as he tries to escape, the second was going to be ‘The Battering Ram’ because that’s when I first introduced Spears’ nickname, and the last section was going to be named ‘The Succubus.’
Two things kept me from keeping it this way. One, while I had a title card to separate the two timelines when it went from Preston’s townhouse to Rob after he left, I didn’t have a title card for when it shifted from Rob’s escape back to the townhouse. The story just went from normal font back to italics on a brand new page, leaving the reader to figure it out. The second was that I realized that even though this was my 22nd story, and that I’d spent years experimenting with different story structures, no one else knew I’d been testing different styles, and this would’ve been a huge leap for readers. It was already going to be different enough bouncing back between the two timelines.
In the end, after a little feedback that it was tough to tell where Rob was in the plot, I added time stamps to the chapters, literally days before its release. It’s one of the best decisions I made for the overall presentation of Dig Down, and it’s probably insane to think of how last minute that change was.