Damian Myron Writes

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Outlining – Phase 1: Surface Level

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Before sitting down to finally write Dig Down, one of the first things I had to determine was what illegal activities had Rob gotten involved in. In essence, what had happened that led up to him being in the desperate state he found himself in at the start of the story. I knew I wanted him facing a slew of charges, and wanted him to have a lot of unsavory characters on his tail. But in order for all that to happen, I needed to not only know what he’d done, but more importantly, I needed to know what had led to his involvement in all those crimes.

One of the first things I did was brainstorm all sorts of criminal activities that Rob could’ve gotten mixed up in. From there, I started to rule out things that, while Rob could’ve been capable of being involved in, that he wasn’t going to have done. The crimes I kept helped shape Rob’s character. At the time, I had no idea what Rob did for a living, but being involved in stock manipulation and insider trading determined for me that he was going to be a broker.

Although I wanted him to face a litany of charges, I also needed it to be understandable why he did the things he did. That helped me pare the list of crimes to its final form, though it did lead to another difficult cut. Early on, as a way to explain how he’d come up with the money to rent a car and pay a coyote, I had planned for him to embezzle money from a charity he’d created. The more noble the charity’s goal, the better. Ultimately, I felt this choice might be too inexcusable, and just left the financing of his escape to the money he’d borrowed from the loan shark.

With all that settled, I crafted a personal history for Rob that outlined not only what he did, but the surface level reason for every action, and is as follows:

Rob graduated college feeling his father would have a top job waiting for him at his company. When Preston gave him a junior salesman position, after some initial success making guaranteed sales to his friends, he began to flounder, until Axel, a businessman without morals with friends in Congress, approached him with a lucrative, though illegal, deal. On the verge of being fired, Rob played ball. Through his partnership with Axel, the “Cowboy”, he met Axel’s daughter Vicky, who he fell in love with, and courted by scoring drugs for her. He began to use as well. Needing to support his escalating addiction, he starts pump and dump scams, until the firm’s clientele starts to vanish. Being a regular with dealers, he is approached by the head of a cartel to launder money through the firm, in exchange for drugs and a share of the profits. He feels invincible, until a strong supporter in Congress gets caught with a dead hooker in a very public way. Needing to hush up the Congressman before they can talk, Rob approaches the cartel to assassinate the prisoner. They agree, in exchange for him being a mule for their drugs. When the Congressman dies, the investigation intensifies, and other hookers step forward, incriminating everyone in the operation. Parties involved look to clean house, and that means silencing Rob. Permanently. Parties include Axel, the Congressman, the pimp of the hookers, and the cartel.

This was the initial rundown that I came up with for Rob’s backstory, and after reading the finished product, you can see I made changes along the way. But like a house, the foundation had been laid.

What I needed to do next was dig deeper into Rob’s motivation to help shape his backstory and focus and tighten the story even more. Next week, I dig down deeper into Rob’s reasoning for every bad decision he made.

My Story (Part II)

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Even by the time he reached his desk, Ryan had still refused to accept any culpability in losing the story. As far as he was concerned, it was his baby, his birthright, and it didn’t matter if the paper had given that snake sole credit.

It also didn’t matter to him how many people had told him to beware of the thief. How often they compared Horace to a vulture, circling around the other reporters, waiting to pick up a juicy story that he could swoop in and claim for himself. 

How many others he had done this to already?

The pulitzer winning reporter had been so friendly to him, an ambitious nobody, fresh out of college, looking to make a name for himself. It didn’t seem possible that Horace was the heartless betrayer the whole paper made him out to be.

Ryan had rationalized the collective attitude in his head. It had to be jealousy, that Horace, a decorated reporter, was simply superior to the rest of them, that they couldn’t stand the praise lavished on Husk year after year, and decided to shun him in shallow retribution.

He ignored the fact that they all told the same story, using that to strengthen his own reasoning of what was going on. That they each said practically the same thing showed they lacked ingenuity and creativity, and that was why Horace surpassed them again and again.

He groaned at the recollection that he had sworn not to turn into his colleagues.

His mentor’s betrayal forced him to look at their warnings as what they always were: facts. They all gave the same testimony because he had stolen from each of them the same way.

What killed him was this happened to him because he had committed a cardinal sin as a reporter. He had ignored the truth because it didn’t fit with the story he wanted to tell himself.

Never again.

Replaying the betrayal in the harsh light of hindsight over and over again forced Ryan to reassess the duplicity with a new perspective. He still refused to accept that the story now dominating the headlines belonged to anyone else, but oddly, this no longer ate at him like it did when he first stormed into Frank’s office.

His focus now was to not end up like the rest of the druthers he worked with. The last thing Ryan wanted was to remain haunted by Horace’s treachery for years, opting to bitch about it to anyone who would listen rather than ever do anything about it.

The con man had taken him under his wing, even fed him some small stories while he was still making headway, just so he could pitch something to Frank. Ryan now saw the ruse for what it was, how deftly Horace had gained the confidence of a plucky young reporter so that when the protege finally broke a big one on their own, the first person they’d share it with was their office hero.

Ryan peered across the bullpen at Horace’s closed door. It still pierced his heart how quickly Horace had scooped up the story after Ryan had shared it with him during their daily afternoon coffee break.

The clarity of hindsight left him pining for the opportunity to have kept the story to himself, or better yet, to have an even greater story up his sleeve.

But he didn’t have a promising prospect of a scoop. Sitting glumly at his desk, he didn’t have anything on the horizon in any aspect of his life. The only thing he had to look forward to was an invite to his brother’s poker game. The only catch was it was being held at his brother’s job, and the last thing he wanted was to freeze his ass off all night on Baltimore’s inner harbor.

Oh if I could do it over again, I’d feed him a line of bull. But that thief will know better than to trust any story I give him after what he just pulled.

Ryan was so caught up in the thought he didn’t notice his desk phone ringing until his neighbor begged him to answer it. He did so sheepishly, but his embarrassment quickly faded away when he recognized the voice on the other end of the line.

“I’ve got something for you. Got a pen handy? Believe me, you’re gonna want to write this down.”

Outlining Dig Down (Part I)

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I’d come up with the idea for Dig Down in 2011. I mainly had the simple premise that a man had to run for his life because many different parties wanted him dead, and a rough outline of the characters that would become Rob, Preston, Beverly, Rocco, and Officer Hastings.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2017 that I started giving the idea serious consideration. To that point, anytime I thought about the story again, I was faced with three problems.

One: who were all the people who would be trying to kill Rob and why? Two: What was Preston’s reason for not helping Rob? And three (and what really stopped me from writing the story for 6 years): After visiting Preston in his townhouse to ask for help, the story was going to ramp up, and Rob would constantly be jumping out of one frying pan into another fire.

How was I going to present this in a way that it wasn’t too drastic of a change for the reader after spending a short time (I was originally expecting only a 20 page scene between Rob and Preston) covering Rob’s troubles in the townhouse?

For me, the solution came when I decided I wasn’t going to tell the story chronologically, but across two alternating timelines. By making this one choice, I could keep the danger Rob faced after leaving the townhouse at its peak, while still giving the audience a breather with emotionally intense, though much somber, moments between Rob and Preston.

This also allowed me to go into more detail about Rob and Preston’s strained relationship, why Preston was reluctant to offer assistance, and how Rob ended up getting mixed up with the rogues gallery of Dig Down.

I’ll go into more details about Rob’s seedy history, next week.

My Story (a serial set in the Dig Down universe)

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I

“THAT WAS MY STORY!” Ryan’s voice boomed between the four walls of Frank’s office.  

The whole room had taken on a reddish tint to Ryan. This must be what it’s like to see blood. He had never been so enraged in his life, afraid of what his scrawny frame was capable of in this state.

In an effort to calm himself, he took in deep huffs of breath. A stack of papers on Frank’s desk fluttered with each forceful exhale, a paperweight the editor kept on top of them the only thing keeping them grounded, and just barely.

Frank remained steadfast in his usual posture, deeply reclined in his chair behind his desk. When he felt Ryan had calmed down sufficiently to have a conversation, he simply asked, “Do you have any proof of that?”

The editor raised a steadying hand when he saw Ryan ready to explode again. “I’m not calling you a liar. I’m just asking if you can substantiate that claim. You’re a reporter. You wouldn’t just run a juicy story without verifying it.”

“You mean like all the drafts of the story I’ve got on my desktop?”

“They’d have drafts on theirs as well.”

“Yeah?” Ryan challenged. “Going back to last week when I first started writing the story? Check the created dates on my drafts, I bet they’ll be earlier than anything that thief has!”

Frank shook his head. “If it were me, I’d just say I deleted some of the earlier drafts until I was satisfied with what I was writing.”

“How about my notes with all of the sources used in the article?”

Frank was shaking his head before he even finished the sentence. “I’m sure they’ll have the same notepad filled with bullet points from their own interview.”

“You really believe that? That we’d each have the exact same contacts on the same story?”

Frank shrugged his shoulders. Ryan always hated that gesture, but never more so now that he was on the receiving end of it.

“We’re all on the same team. It’s possible your contacts wouldn’t think anything about a reporter from the same newspaper asking to verify the information they gave you. Especially if it was Horace calling them.”

Ryan saw an opportunity and seized it. “So you agree it’s possible he stole my story.” Not a question.

Now it was Frank’s turn to exhale deeply. “As much as I’d believe it’s possible that a struggling reporter tried to take credit for a story by a heavily honored newsman.”

The editor let that hang in the air.

And there it is. They all warned you Frank wouldn’t turn on his golden boy. 

“So I’ll ask again. Do you have any proof?”

Ryan’s deep breaths were on the precipice of hyperventilation. Each successive inhale was as tough to swallow as the admission.

“No,” he said, barely above a whisper.

Frank started to give a pep talk about hanging in there, but Ryan barely heard it, let alone processed it. Leaving Frank’s office did nothing to help him escape his nightmare.

As he made his way back to his desk, Ryan stopped at a profile picture Horace Husk used for each of his articles, that the paper had blown up to cover the wall from ceiling to floor. Each pearly white of his eat shit grin was as big as Ryan’s head. 

Still fuming, Ryan fought the urge to claw at the picture, to rip that smug grin off of its face. Fantasies of doing the real thing paraded through his mind, seducing him.

He noticed his fists were clenched, and took a moment to study his stature. Reality set in, and he knew, even in a fury, attacking the “reporter” physically wouldn’t amount to much.

He’d probably write a story about how he survived a “deadly attack” from a “deranged colleague” and get another award.

For the first time since storming into Frank’s office, Ryan felt calm. He knew a fight wasn’t the optimal way to exact his revenge.

And he would have his revenge.

(The story will continue, next Thursday)

Plotter or Pantser?

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During the months leading up to the launch of Dig Down, I was spending most of my time researching the hundreds of things I needed to get done to make the launch as successful as possible. I watched numerous YouTube channels that gave instructions on how to create a website, building a social media platform, the best uses of your time and money, and I could go on and on.

It was extremely helpful getting tips from other writers who’d already taken the journey themselves, and I was always searching out new sources of information. One of the best resources I came across was the podcast So You Want to be a Writer.

Not only was this show hosted by two authors who chronicled the goings on of their own careers, they also held weekly interviews with other writers. Talk about a healthy dose of exposure to the writing process.

The end of their interviews always play out like Inside the Actor’s Studio where they’ll ask their guest the same series of questions. One question they posed stuck with me: they’d ask “Are you a plotter or a pantser?” Essentially, do you work out what’s going to happen in your story before you start writing, or do you fly by the seat of your pants, making it up as you go along?

I’ve got a lot of respect to all the writers who identify as pantsers, and I understand the reasoning behind their writing process. Authors like Stephen King and George R.R. Martin fall into this category, stating that they want to be as surprised at what happens next when they write it as their audience will be reading it.

But, I’m a meticulous plotter, through and through. I leave room for improvisation, and there’s always revisions I find I need to make both while writing and after, but I need a steady framework of where I am in the story and where it’s going or I’ll never finish. For Dig Down, I think I spent more time outlining the story than I did writing the first draft.

In the coming weeks, I’ll go into detail about how much I craft the story before I put down a single word

Getting Started

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Ever since I made the announcement that I was going to be self publishing my first book, I’ve received an overwhelming amount of support. I’ve loved seeing the screenshots people have taken of their order confirmations, and selfies where they’re reading my story.

A few people have told me it’s quite an accomplishment just to finish writing a book, and that while they have an idea or two, they wouldn’t know where to begin. So I thought I’d share what works for me.

Whenever I sit down to write a book (and I just did this on the new novel I’m working on), on the first day, I write a grand total of…

…1 page.

Even though I’m not looking for perfection in a first draft, and I know it will be heavily edited when it’s put through round after round of revisions, I stick to writing 1 page.

The reason I do this is because no matter the size of the story, I know it’s going to be a long process. It can look daunting at the onset, and you can get easily discouraged and give up in these early stages. I want that journey to start out on the right foot. So I set a small goal that I know I can easily hit, and build on that momentum.

So if you’re someone who’s got an idea for a book, give this a try. I look forward to reading your story soon.