Another day in workshop, another writing exercise. This is an oldie-but-goodie. You get a random slip of paper with two characters and a subject and have to convey the information entirely in dialog. Since the point was to read these aloud and let everyone guess who and what is going on I’ll let you read the dialog first and then tell you what my slips of paper said.
“Let’s try a different approach, Kit. We’re descending at a rate of two metres a minute…”
“Got it. Two metres.”
“But we’ll need to fire retrorockets to slow our descent when we’re half a kilometre above the landing pad…”
“Fire rockets… one half kilometre…”
“So, since we’re currently twenty minutes from landing…”
“Wait. Twenty minutes? How far away is that, Mr. Teague?”
“Right. That’s what I want you to calculate.”
“But that’s… six feet per minute, sixty seconds for every six feet, sixty seconds for every six feet, so, one foot every… ONE FOOT EVERY TEN SECONDS!”
“Calm down, Kit, calm down.”
“We have to fire retrorockets NOW! We’re going to plow right into Mars at… wait… ten seconds times five thousand two hundred eighty feet… divide by–no! Multiply by six. But it’s approximately half that, so multiply by three…”
In kilometres, Kit. Remember?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Teague, but we’re about to die and I just can’t think in metric conversions under those conditions.”
So, did you guess:
Kid and a math teacher
Going to Mars?
