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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.

For the longest time, Bruce stared at the boarded up façade in stunned silence. His eyes no longer held the faintest detection of bleariness from the whisky, yet he found it hard to believe them.

Finally, his lip curled in the slightest tilt of a smile.

His initial thought to retreat before he was recognized disintegrated. Bruce chuckled at the foolishness to flee. There was no need to leave this place.

He belonged here.

He had been here years before Preston and Moore had bought the building as part of their meteoric expansion. The years had not been kind to Bruce since their arrival. Bruce had once walked these streets for years, considering himself the ‘Lord of the Financial District.’ He was as much of a sales rep, signing new clients to the firm, as he was an analyst. For years, he felt like there was the go to guy for getting the job done at Hadley Financial Co., and that there was nothing he couldn’t do when he walked through their doors.

Then this firm that no one ever heard of from Arizona started buying up property all over the country, expanding into different regional offices, and all the clients he had wooed from competitors went flocking to the new kid on the block. This new firm delivered haymaker after haymaker, long after Bruce had been pummeled into the canvass.

But I’m still here.

The passersby were too busied absorbed in their own lives to notice him spit on their front door. The gesture didn’t quench his thirst to lash out. He doubted people would still ignore him if he exacted any further revenge, and decided to disappear into the alley surrounding Preston and Moore to relieve himself along their walls instead of on their front stoop like he wanted to.

Bruce chuckled as he emerged back onto the sidewalk. He felt a sense of vindication, not in what he’d just done, but that he’d outlasted them. He’d said for years that something was fishy about the way the firm was operating, that there was no way to have that much sustained growth. It was reinvigorating to have lived long enough to see he was right.

It was all unfair, he thought to himself as he looked around the street again, this time regaining his long lost perspective that he not only belonged here, but that these streets belonged to him.

They’ll see that now.  They might not recognize me at first, but if they see me now…they’ll probably be eager to see me…eager to apologize, ready to admit they were wrong.

Ready to welcome me back.

Bruce felt he could’ve flown back to his old office building. It hadn’t been so long that he’d forgotten the way. He arched his scraggly brow when he saw it. The façade looked dingy and faded, not the glowing beacon he’d expected, or had envisioned it to be through the lenses of nostalgia.

No. It’s definitely different.

The sun didn’t shine off the windows because they hadn’t been cleaned in some time. There wasn’t a steady flow of people walking in and out of the front door, both customers and employees alike. He realized he hadn’t been the only casualty in Hadley Financial’s purge.

“Bruce?” a familiar voice asked behind him.

Slowly, he turned to face her.

“Hello, Miranda.”

When I begin to edit my stories, I take a completely different approach to my writing. As I mentioned in an earlier post, when I’m writing a first draft, if I realize I’ve made a mistake (something major, not a grammar or spelling mistake), unless it’s within the page I’m currently typing, I continue to forge ahead so I keep my momentum.

Once I’ve gotten a first draft down, all subsequent drafts are a whole other animal. I still go through page by page, chapter by chapter, but now, if I’ve missed something, I have no problem zipping back to an earlier page or chapter to make that revision.

The reason for this change in my attitude has to do with accomplishment. If I’m working on a second draft or later, that means I’ve already written the story once. The weight of that accomplishment isn’t lost on me. I know I’ve done something a lot of people want to see out to do but never see through.

No matter what, I have that first draft. All drafts I’m working on afterwards are saved as a completely different file, so even if I make changes that I don’t like, I still have proof of what I’ve already accomplished. While rewrites are hard trying to determine what you want to edit and how, this actually makes it easier for me.

It’s because I already have this version of the story written that allows me the freedom to dart around it making changes. Even after the extensive outlining I do, sometimes, a plot point or line of dialogue doesn’t go where I think it does. It takes a first draft (at least) to really understand how the story should come together. Once I actually have the whole story down on paper, I know what belongs where within it. It’s no longer about keeping the momentum going, it’s about making sure everything’s in its right place and when you read it it’s smooth as silk. With the two weeks I take away from my story, I’ve also got a fresher pair of eyes to review it, which makes it easier to spot changes that need to be made that I missed the first time, or the way a passage or chapter should read.

Remember, the hardest part of the writing process is over. The story has been written. Now it just needs to be reworked so that it can reach its true potential. When I look at rewrites from that perspective, it makes it a lot easier to make revisions, because I know I’m just giving the story all the polish it needs to be as great as it can be.

Bruce found himself doing something he hadn’t done in the better part of a year: strutting down the street. It was intoxicating to see his feet hadn’t lost their ability to move with a swagger in their step.

He pressed himself to recall the last time he’d won a negotiation before this afternoon. There had been plenty of pleading with the bank not to foreclose on him, and begging for someone to hire him at countless job interviews, but this deal with the school teacher finally ended the longest dry spell of his life.

Like riding a bike.

Bruce read the name on the bill: Hamilton. It had been so long since he’d seen one, he’d forgotten which president was on it. When he was a big shot, he would’ve never touched a denomination this small, not even to blow his nose with. Now, it was his most prized possession since he’d moved into the park.

He chuckled to himself imagining the look on Hakeem’s face when he bought tonight’s bottle of cheap whisky with an actual ten dollar bill. Hakeem was sure to shit bricks at the sight of it. Most of the time, Bruce dumped a mountain of coins and one dollar bills on the counter that he’d accumulated over a couple of days.

Bruce looked up to see where he was, and for the first time, noticed the stares he was getting from the people who actually spared a glance at him. Most were too busy orchestrating deals on their phones, hailing cabs, or talking to one another to even notice him. He was just another derelict who’d ventured into the financial district, and as long as he wasn’t hassling them for money, they were more than willing to ignore him.

His throat ran dry. The half bottle of whisky he’d poured down his throat today felt like a distant memory.

Why? Of all the places to meander to, why’d my feet carry me here?

Muscle memory, he supposed.

He felt himself shrink under their hostile gazes. For a moment, he hugged his ten dollar bill tight to his chest in fear, though not because he believed any of them would waste the effort to try and take it from him. They were all like him. Or rather, they were all like he once was. Bruce cradled the bill closely because it was the closest thing he had to a security blanket.

Please, he begged. Please don’t let any of them recognize me.

Though he was being analyzed by some hostile eyes, he was grateful there wasn’t the faintest hint of recognition in any of them. He had marched up and down this street proudly for a whole decade, but that old version of him was clearly long forgotten.

His eyes scanned up and down the sidewalk. So much was still familiar. Emilio was still running his taco stand at the corner, with his usual line of twenty people taking a late lunch. Rebecca was lazily waving people in and out of the paid parking lot while never putting down the latest book she was wearing out. Even old Mr. Garrison was leading a group of executives into his limo to head off to some restaurant or golf course to conduct some business.

So much looked the same, and yet everything felt so foreign. No one in a power suit sharing the side walk recognized him, but at the same time, he didn’t recognize any of them either. They all looked much younger than he was when he was trading stocks.

A slight breeze picked up, ripping a napkin from the hands of one of Emilio’s customers. Bruce watched it dance along the sidewalk until it brushed up against a building whose windows and doors were boarded up. His breath caught as he took in the monstrosity for the first time in years.

The building was the old Midwest branch of Preston and Moore.

I always love seeing the finish line when I’m writing a story. At this point, I’ve been fleshing out the idea for some time, months, if not years. The idea will have hit me at some point and wouldn’t leave me alone, forcing me to think about it, explore it, and decide that there was an actual story there instead of something that just sounds a little interesting.

After this preliminary stage of exploration, I’ll have spent months outlining how the story would unfold, what kind of characters would participate in these events, how they got there, their motivations, until I’ve fleshed out enough of the story to start telling it. I never know everything when I start writing, and there’re always discoveries to be made as I start writing that first draft, but I’ll know enough about the world to get comfortable starting.

The way I approach writing leaves it so I’m never overwhelmed with what I want to write in one day, setting me up to reach my daily goals because I never have to write more than four pages. The tradeoff to that is that it does mean it may take me more time to compose the first draft. Dig Down, being on the shorter side, took me about forty days to write a first draft, but for most other books I’ve written, that first draft will take months to write. Add to that the time I’ve spent sculpting the idea in my head, and you’re looking at a massive investment of time just to complete a rough draft.

This may be a little discouraging to think about how much time it will take just to finish a first draft, which by no means will be perfect and still require a lot of work to mold it into the polished story you want to tell. But that’s the wrong perspective to take. If you’ve reached this point in the writing process, it’s something to celebrate. You’ve accomplished what a lot of people who want to write a book never have: you finished telling your story. It might be a little rough around the edges, but you stuck with it long after most others would’ve quit.

Writing is hard. Its victories are earned. That’s why whenever I complete a draft, I acknowledge the feat I’ve accomplished, and give myself a little vacation from it. Once I’ve completed a draft, I don’t pick it up and look at it for two weeks. It gives my mind a little reset from the idea I’ve been obsessed with for months now, and allows me to spot mistakes or areas to improve a little bit easier.

So if you find yourself running into a wall in your own writing, stop and think about how far you’ve come. Have you been at it for a while? Are there some personal victories of your own along the way? Acknowledge them. That positive reinforcement might be just what you need to finish.

I loved writing the tense chase and action sequences in Dig Down. To me, this was one of the key ingredients that made the story stand out among all the other stories out there. A lot of books have glossed over scenes containing combat. I remember when I read Lord of the Rings epic battles were boiled down into an overview of how the battle was progressing with a few moments sprinkled in where the main characters felled some orcs. Other novels I’ve read that are even categorized as action have hand to hand conflicts resolved very quickly.

I don’t mean this as a critique on these other books. Lord of the Rings had deeper themes it focused on, and the trilogy is a masterpiece for it. Those action books that I read usually had an intriguing plot, whether it was unraveling a cover up or getting entwined in some conspiracy, and the action scenes were sprinkled in there to keep the reader engaged. All I mean is that I noticed that if I focused on putting Rob Moore in dire straits constantly, my story would stand out in the marketplace.

As I wrote last week, I wanted to put my main character through the ringer as he was running for his life. If there was something that would make his life even harder, I threw it at him. I absolutely believe it was the right call for this type of story, but as I was writing it, I came to appreciate why so many other stories don’t go into the weeds like I did describing tense action sequences.

If you’re an aspiring writer who wants to write books loaded with action, be forewarned: this is extremely challenging.

At any given point, you have to be omniscient about spatial awareness among your characters. The mall sequence is a good example of this. I had to constantly know where the characters were in relation to each other and their environment. When Rob first enters the mall, I had to know the distance between him and Rocco. If Rocco was too close, how does Rob lose him in the crowd? When the sicarios enter the mall, where is Rob so that they all see each other? When Rob’s trying to evade them by following Rocco but not so closely that Rocco sees that Rob is behind him, where are they all in relation to each other, and what is keeping Rocco from turning around and seeing the man he’s after. The more creative I was with my scenes, the more I had to account for.

The same went for the suffering I put Rob through. As I also mentioned in last week’s post, I wanted the reader to feel the impact of everything that Rob went through. When I had him jump off the roof of the mall to escape the sicarios, there was repercussions for doing so. In keeping himself alive, Rob injured himself mightily. It affected not only what he did next, but his ability to move through the rest of the story.  It factored into his decision about whether to pull up into the driveway of Vicky’s house or park in a neighbor’s and walk the rest of the way because he suspected an ambush. Having the car right there would make his escape attempt quicker, but the sound of the car pulling up would tip off anyone waiting inside that he’d arrived. If he walked there, he might be able to spot the ambush before they even knew Rob was there, but if Rob was spotted, he’d then have a hard time escaping because his max speed was hobbling.

Don’t read this as a deterrent, just keep this in mind if you ever decide to venture into writing action. You’ll need to constantly keep these aspects in mind, both in setting up the tension and conflict, and in executing the scene. It’s challenging, but it can be done. And if you stick to it, you’ll find it very rewarding, your story will stand out among its peers, and it will be better for.