Hello, writers. I was just getting ready to write this week’s diary about dialogue when this fine, though tragically-inspired, interchange burst into the international media:
http://tinyurl.com/...
Different versions of the dialogue have appeared on various news sites, all edited to emphasize things that particular editors and reporters want emphasized, and all translated in different ways from the Italian. (And with varying degrees of coyness, but I gather that “cazzo” translates into American as “schmuck”.)
I don’t wish to make light of the shipwreck, but the dialogue… well, the dialogue is almost perfect as it is. It follows several important rules of good dialogue writing.
1. It’s about something.
Everything that’s said has a good reason for being said, and adds to the shaping of the scene.
It sticks to the subject, just as people usually do in real life and always should in fiction (unless there’s a narrative reason for them not to). Nobody’s pausing to reminisce over how they got into this situation. In fact, at one point De Falco says that they’ll stay on topic—they won’t talk now about how Schettino managed to get into this mess.
(And they certainly won’t talk about their upbringings, earlier careers, first wives… and all the other things that some writers would feel the need to bring into this discussion. Truly.)
2. Each character has a distinct point of view.
Schettino’s might be summed up as “Oh no no no this did not happen. No.”
De Falco’s is along the lines of “Who is this cazzo?”
Neither character could speak the other’s lines. Their voices and viewpoints are distinct and every utterance makes this clear. (If you can reassign the lines in your dialogue to other characters without rewriting them, you’ve got trouble.)
3. The utterances suit the mood.
The mood is angsty. So nobody is joking or, God help us, making puns (no matter how good a pun the writer thinks it is). Nobody is inserting useful as-you know-Bob’s —“The ship, which is a 114,500-ton Costa-class cruise liner, is tilting…”—and the two men haven’t got time for social chit-chat. They also aren’t analyzing how they feel.
There's no backstory-- backstory slows things down.
There are a couple things that make this not work as fictional dialogue. One is that, for the most part, the men are speaking in complete, grammatically correct sentences, and they don’t use many contractions. The result is that they sound a bit stilted. That’s most likely an effect of the translation.
The other is that the more alert individual, De Falco, speaks a lot longer than you’d generally want to let a character speak. Characters are usually held to one or, at most, two lines per utterance except when ranting. And most of the news articles have indeed cut Mr. De Falco to one or two sentences even though he had abundant reason to rant.
So, tonight’s challenge is to edit a part of the transcript. Try to make it into better fiction.
Out of respect for the victims and their families, please change the setting and the speakers’ names.
You can do this by moving the dialogue to a different place, different time, different planet, different dimension, different species… and of course there’s always Togwogmagog.
Use dialogue tags (eg he said) and whatever action seems appropriate to you. If you want to cut out or rewrite parts of the dialogue, that’s fine too.
This selection is from the last part of the transcript, which has not been widely used in news articles.
S: Well, we were carrying out evacuation procedures, but now all the officers have gathered on the rescue boat with me.
D: Where are you guys? All on the rescue boat? Excuse me, earlier you told me you were with one colleague only -- now all the officers are there?
S: Yes, there's me, my second officer, and...
D: If the officers were able to get down there, it means they were still able to move...
S: Indeed, now.
D: Then why are they not going back on board to see what the situation is like and then tell us about it, thank you? Send them on board! Send someone on board to coordinate!
S: Now it's not...
D: Send someone back on board!
S: I am trying to coordinate that.
D: I am giving you an order. You must send someone on board now!
S: We are going on board to coordinate ourselves...
D: Exactly! You must go on board to coordinate the disembarking! Is that clear?
S: We can no longer get on board now, the ship has sunk completely.
D: Why did you allow them to get off, captain?
S: I didn't. We just abandoned ship.
D: With 100 people still on board you abandoned ship? [expletive]
--source: New York Post
(By the way, I noticed in the news articles that one of the parts the reporters tended to leave out was De Falco’s question about whether there were women and children to be evacuated. “Women and children first” isn’t an actual law, and since in this narrative De Falco represents Law and Order while the other gentleman represents Teh Crazy, that question doesn’t suit the story. So out it goes. Good editing! Well, for fiction, anyway.)
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