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After spending most of the outlining process figuring out what kind of person would be involved in the scandals of Dig Down, and developing their backstory, that still left me with a monumental task:

The actual chase.

The initial concept for the book was a man running for his life, pursued by numerous criminals who all want him dead. Although I finally knew who he was, I hadn’t come up with dire scenarios and daring escapes.

I only had three ideas for escape sequences: one where a loan shark has him at gunpoint, one where he was being chased through the mall by two different enemies, and one where the surviving characters were in the middle of a standoff (think the end of Reservoir Dogs). But anyone whose read Dig Down knows: two of those events occur in the first 6 chapters of the story, which are (aside from Chapter 6) among the shortest in the entire book. The last is the finale, and while I was confident that this was how the book needed to end (just about) I didn’t have a roadmap of how to get there.

These were the last two questions I needed answers for before I could start writing. The answer I came up with had to do with the purpose of Rob going to Preston in the first place. After entering Preston’s townhouse at the end of Chapter 1, he emerges from it to start Chapter 2 lugging a briefcase. I knew what would be in it, but as part of the reason for alternating between two timelines, the reader wouldn’t. The intrigue of its contents hopefully helped keep the reading turning pages, but its purpose helped me determine what Rob would do next, along with the impossible situation he’d get snared in.

Going to Preston for the suitcase was already the reason he would find himself held at gunpoint by the loan shark. Getting out of that situation caught the attention of the sociopath, who became one of the two parties involved in pursuing him through the mall. The circumstances surrounding his escape would lead him to arriving at Dr. Kine’s office needing medical treatment. Stealing the sociopath’s car there would explain how Rocco knew where to find him at the end of the story.

When I applied necessity to each sequence, the plot of the chase became clear. Since I’d already established he was in danger if he was found by multiple parties, anything he had to do or anywhere he had to go to escape could be turned into a moment of tension as he had to escape, so long as the setting was a natural next step Rob would take.

Next time, I’ll review how every chase sequence had to fulfill two purposes.

Continuing with the analysis of Chapter 3, I’ve yet to touch on the true purpose of the chapter. In my outline, this was when the reader finds out everything Rob is accused of and why he’s running for his life.

I knew that the townhouse chapters were going to focus primarily on Rob and Preston’s relationship, and the tumultuous history they shared, but the driving force behind that history was all the activities Rob partook in to make a fast buck. All of the crimes are brought up during the chase chapters, scattered throughout Dig Down, but some activities, like drug smuggling, don’t get brought up until Chapter 18. At this point, I felt it would be too late to spring this on the reader, so I needed to incorporate this into the book sooner. Once again, Chapter 3 was up to the task.

This was a tricky thing to pull off. As a writer, you don’t want to dole out information by dumping exposition on the reader. An exposition dump is when a writer gives the reader all the relevant information in a clump of paragraphs. When done poorly, it will be written as Preston telling a Rob information theyhe would already naturally know, like “I’m angry at you because the news says police are after you because you are involved in stock manipulation, insider trading, drug smuggling and prostitution.”

At this point, all the reader knows is that Rob is on the run for some reason. If I’ve done my job right, there should be a sense of intrigue and mystery about why Rob’s running. Outlining and writing the scene, I needed to keep those feelings going until I revealed what the charges were.

To do this, I didn’t have Preston inform Rob he was mad, but convey his anger with his icy silence. This reinforces the hostility Rob encountered at the end of Chapter 1. The TV that Rob mutes has his face on it. This suggests that what Rob is running from has made headlines.  Preston continues to give Rob the silent treatment as Rob examines the townhouse. This was done so that, in addition to blocking the entire townhouse sequence, establishing the curtains, portrait, paperweight, and characterization of both characters, ideally, the readers would keep turning the pages to find out what the crimes were.

Only when Rob makes for the portrait does Preston break his silence, first turning the volume up on the TV, then shouting his frustration at having to hear all about Rob’s activities, and only then, a quick rundown of what he’s accused of. While I’m delivering exposition here, my goal was for this to be delivered as a payoff to the reader, answering the question they would have from the start of the chapter.

I immediately tried to make sure the reader didn’t dwell this exposition by offering a new source of intrigue for them. I did this by teasing two new bits of information. One, I had Rob insist he was innocent. Two, I had Rob correctly guess which congressmen were condemning him, and then calling them hypocrites . At this point, the reader will realize that although I may have told them what Rob is accused of, they don’t know who was actually involved and how they were done. The chapter then ends.

If Chapter 3 has done its job,  the reader wants to find out how all these parties are involved, and they’ll continue reading.

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.

I had originally planned to write Dig Down in chronological order, but there was one major issue that kept me from starting: the scene where Rob comes to Preston asking for help. The dilemma was broken up into two problems. One: why would Preston refuse to help Rob. Two: the length of the scene.

I felt the length of their scene together had huge ramifications for the rest of the story. If it was too short, it might not only feel rushed but like it was one big exposition dump. If it was too long, I felt the shift from a conversation between father and son to that the chase that followed would be too jarring of a transition. I didn’t want the story to feel like Tuesdays with Morrie turned into Speed halfway through.

The idea to write Dig Down as two alternating timelines solved both these problems for me. Although half the chapters were devoted to the conversation between Rob and Preston, I could make them any length I wanted, and these chapters tend to be the shorter ones in the book. So the conversation is still a significant part of the story while the chronicles of Rob’s escape still take center stage.

This solved the pacing issues I thought would be present when I tried to write it chronologically. Just as the tension was ramping up or after an intense sequence, I could give the reader a bit of a breather with a more calming (though hopefully emotional intense) scene, before throwing them and Rob right back into the frying pan.

Structuring Dig Down this way also allowed me to flesh out Preston and the relationship Rob had with him even more. Until this point, my only description of him was that he was Rob’s father and was sickly. I had yet to determine, other than he needed the money for his medical expenses, why he would refuse to help his son out. Part of the reason for that was I just didn’t believe I could devote as much time to the character that I eventually did if I’d written Dig Down in chronological order.

 I had originally envisioned the scene between him and Rob lasting as long as the opening scene in Dial M for Murder. That scene dishes out all the information you need to know methodically, just like the villain the movie centers around, but it also fit the tone and pace of the movie. One long scene like that didn’t fit the fast pace I’d intended for Dig Down. Now, by breaking up this part of the story, I’d create a new (but much more manageable) problem for myself.

If half of the chapters were now going to be devoted to the debate between Rob and Preston, I needed to be able to supply them both with ammunition to battle for so long. In order to do that, I needed to understand who Preston was.

What I came up with was that Preston was the opposite of Rob. Whereas Rob was lazy and always looking for shortcuts, Preston was a self-made man, and a strong believer in doing things the right way. He would have developed a steadfast routine and honed it over time, so that even when he was going through some tough times, that foundation would always be there to support him getting back on his feet.

But he’s also Rob’s father, and so even though they are fundamentally different, he’ll always have the best intentions for Rob in all his actions, even though Rob never sees it that way. When Rob is insulted by being offered a measly sales rep job instead of an executive position, Preston sees it as helping his son attain the discipline he didn’t receive when he coasted and underachieved through college. When Rob feels Preston is holding him back by not promoting him, even after he’s signed a record number of new clients, Preston views it as tough love, believing that Rob still hasn’t shed his lazy work ethic, and keeping him in the position until Rob is forced to learn the business. When Rob feels betrayed that his father would fire him, Preston believed he was choosing the lesser of two evils. Although Rob would be devastated being fired in the short term, Preston felt that if he continued to let Rob falter and drain the company’s money, there’d be no job for him in the future.

I went through the entire backstory I had outlined for Rob and gave a justification for every one of Preston’s actions that Rob would’ve felt was persecution. In doing so, I now had the framework for a great debate between father and son, that satisfied my need to make Rob look sympathetic on the surface, but would also reveal the love that Preston held for him every step of the way.