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In order for the scene’s in Preston’s townhouse  to feel fast-paced like the rest of Dig Down, they needed to be efficient. There was no room for the literary equivalent of Mumblecore, where there were a lot of useless actions or dialogue. Everything had to be crisp and serve a purpose.

Chapter 3 has Rob and Preston really speaking for the first time. All the reader knows is that they have a strained relationship, based off the tepid reception Rob gets when he first arrives and is looking for help. The challenge here was not only making the conversation that followed feel natural, but feeling like there was a reason for it being there.

While Rob is muting the TV so he doesn’t have to face what he’s done, and drawing the blinds so no one can see him, he tries to fill the void of silence by commenting on Preston’s possessions. Originally, talking about his furniture was meant to just be a placeholder, but the more I thought about it, the more what Rob was saying fit.

Rob’s monologue about Preston’s home served to not only be a way for Rob to stumble through starting a conversation with his father, but shed light on the characterization about both of them. Rob’s observations about how everything here is twenty years old and is just as good as they day they were bought is meant to lay the foundation for the time of character Preston is. Preston throughout the story constantly defends how tough he was on Rob because he was always trying to instill a strong foundation in him so that his hard work now would take care of him later. The furniture and other items in his townhouse reflect the choices made by that type of man. Preston took the time filling his home with quality items and took care of them, and as a result, he’s had no need to replace them, and they still serve him decades later.  

Rob reveals the nature of his own character during the same monologue. Comparing his own household to Preston’s, he says they’re replacing everything every five years, and goes on to further state that everything’s flashy, but nothing’s reliable. He even shares an anecdote that he went to numerous stores just to find something suitable the last time he shopped for furniture.

Throughout Dig Down, it is revealed that Rob had a lazy work ethic when he first started working for his father, trying to win over clients with flash and pizzazz instead of knowing the business inside and out. This led him to struggle and was the first step in his path to getting entangled with the many unsavory characters of Dig Down. Like the furniture he bought, things broke down, while Preston, like his furniture, was still reliable. That Rob was still buying these flashy items also hinted that he hadn’t learned from his past mistakes.

It was a quick interlude meant to transition Rob’s arrival at Preston’s to the beginning of the fight between them, but it served to lay the foundation for the types of characters they both were.

Preston would’ve been proud.

As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Dig Down had to be fast. I believed a frantic pace would really emphasize what Rob was experiencing as he was running for his life. While this was natural for the chapters where he’s being chased, I knew from the start that the chapters in Preston’s townhouse would prove to be a challenge.

There were a couple tactics I used to keep the pace flowing for these scenes, whose primary focus was exposition and character. The first, as I went over last week, was to write them in a similar style to the chase chapters, was stacking the many things going on in the scene on top of one another. The second writing tool I used was establishing setups and payoffs throughout this sequence.

In order for Dig Down to feel fast paced, I was going to have to be economical with my words. I kept the description of Preston’s townhouse brief, because the details of it weren’t what was important, both in the scenes (the focus needed to be on Rob and Preston’s relationship) and in the story as a whole (Rob running for his life). With that in mind, I took a bare bones approach to describing the layout of the townhouse; a living room, a kitchen, a study, with windows on each side. This minor description was what I used to create the setups for what happened later in the story.

The first detail I setup was the windows on all four sides. It’d already been established in chapter 1 that Rob didn’t want to be spotted by anyone, nearly jumping out of his skin when Ms. Harrington steps out of her townhouse. Rob’s initial reaction when he sees the windows is to draw the blinds because he doesn’t want to be seen by the neighbors. This is the setup. When Beverly enters the townhouse later and remarks they should get some light in here, this is the reminder. Rob’s inability to come up with a reason to keep them drawn ensures that they were going to stay open for the remainder of his time there. While it might seem that this was just returning the blinds to their original state, it was actually crucial to draw the reader’s attention to the windows being open when he first enters the townhouse.

The payoff occurs in chapter 19, when the reader sees the consequences for keeping the blinds open, as it creates another problem for Rob to deal with. In a way, I feel this is actually a double payoff because it also (hopefully) satisfies the intrigue setup at the end of chapter 2.

 I kick off another setup and payoff in chapter 3 when Rob is first remarking on Preston’s townhouse. While Rob is comparing the quality of items that Preston has in his townhouse, one of the things he mentions is a frog paperweight. This knickknack plays an important role in the story, but in the first draft, I didn’t introduce it until the end of the story. On my second draft, I established it here, to setup a bigger payoff later. In chapter 15, when Rob and Preston enter the study, I make sure to mention that Rob’s fingers dance across the paperweight. This was done solely to remind the reader that this was here. The payoff comes in chapter 19.

 One last small example to go over would be the painting in Preston’s study. Once again, this was one of the few objects that I describe in chapter 3, and that’s because of its importance to the story later on. Anyone reading Dig Down a second time might notice that the characters acknowledged its importance from the start. After drawing all the blinds, Rob is practically drawn to the painting, since what it’s hiding is his main purpose for coming to Preston. And it is only when Preston sees Rob heading towards it that he breaks his silence and starts talking to his son. The payoff comes later when you see what the painting was hiding.

Next week, I’ll be going into how I incorporated characterization into this chapter.

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.