podficmeta | What makes a fic podficcable or unpodficcable?

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topic: story selection

What makes a fic podficcable or unpodficcable?

I want to know, is there anything specifically people look for when choosing fics to podfic (other than rare pairings/fandoms right now since

amplificathon is currently running :P). I mean, obviously people go for fics they like but are there elements of the writing style that will draw you in or have you backing away?

If an author wanted to write something specifically with podfic in mind, how could they go about that?

I think the obvious ones for me would be basic spelling and grammar (and few typos) just because I'm hesitant to change the author's words even if they don't make sense. If a fic doesn't have those things down, I don't even consider podficcing it.

Most of the other things that get to me are harder to pin down before a recording and it's not until I'm reading into my mic or later editing that I notice these things.

Dialogue tags: or something to help indicate who's speaking. Visually you have line breaks and text formatting to help show when speakers have switched off but that's not there in podfic. There are things podficcers can do to help (doing voices, longer pauses when speakers have switched of, etc.) but it's definitely nice.

Repetitive words: they're really obvious in podfic. "Sara jumped off the bed and looked under the bed" even look a bit wrong written but it really jumps out when read aloud. Or "John said... Cameron said... Reilly said...Derek said..." all in a row, on paper it can almost be ignored when you replace the "..." with speech but if it's used in the same spot every time someone speaks it's very noticeable in a podfic.

Vocabulary: There are a lot of words whose meanings we know but may never have heard spoken aloud. I know I've found myself rushing to a dictionary more than once in the middle of a recording. And while the odd word off won't scare me off if every second word isn't one I know would probably intimidate me into giving up.

What actually can scare me off before I even start is if you combine vocabulary with repetition. If some word I'm not confident in my ability to pronounce is featured throughout a fic I might not want to try recording it. Or it can cause problems while I'm recording, my last podfic heavily featured the word "masseur" and by the end it didn't even sound like a word to me any more :S

Language: Lots of fics can be written in one language but still feature another language within it. I don't know which is worse, a story with a human language I'm not all that familiar with or a made up alien/supernatural language. Conceivably I can look up how to pronounce a human language but, that way lies making native speakers cringe at my butchering. At least no one can tell me I'm screwing up a made up language, however since it's made up, the author may have felt things such as vowels or something are unnecessary making it super hard to pronounce.

Embedded asides: Have you ever run across sentences where mid though, the author will go on a tangent and by the time the get back to the sentence on hand you forget what was originally being said? At least when reading the words on screen, your eyes can wander back to the beginning of the sentence to see where things were left off but with audio, it's a lot harder to stop and rewind.

Huh, I was able to come up with more than I expected on my own. What do you guys think?

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SIBILANTS. the close proximity of sibilants is death, because it's hard to pronounce them clearly without sounding unnatural and awkward. e.g. "Grace shed her clothes, smiling shyly:" I try to articulate words as clearly as possible, to compensate for a tendency to mumble (and wow, I didn't realize how unarticulated my speech was until I started podficcing), and when sibilants are right next to each other, they tend to mash up and run into one another unless I come to a full stop between each word, which sounds weird.

God, haven't we all hit a sentence like that? Where we have to read it over and over again 50 times and by the time we get it "right" (ie. we're so frustrated we decide "good enough!") it sounds kind of awkward because the tone and speed and volume are all wrong.

and wow, I didn't realize how unarticulated my speech was until I started podficcing
Sometimes as I edit I marvel that anyone can understand a single word from my mouth. /o\

Have you ever run across sentences where mid though, the author will go on a tangent and by the time the get back to the sentence on hand you forget what was originally being said?

Asterisks/footnotes. Parenthetical asides are fine, but how do you denote asterisks? I ran into this for the first time yesterday.

Note (adopt stuffy voice to read the note) Return to text (read the text in normal narrative voice.

I usually say: "footnote", then I read the footnote, and then say "end of footnote". And like Zvi says, you can usually indicate with your voice that something different is happening during the footnote.

Oh, and also, I ran into a problem once where there was a long footnote set into the middle of a sentence. In that case I moved the footnote to the end of the sentence, because it would be hard to understand the sentence if it was split in two--you'd have forgotten the beginning when you finally got to hear the second part.

I haven't run into this for any of the fics I've podficced but a great example to listen to would be the pro audiobook for Good Omens. I listened to that story before I ever saw the print of it and never really realized that there were footnotes in the text, the reader did such a good job of incorporating it into the reading (that's not to say he changed the text, he just included the footnotes as an aside to what he was reading that felt totally natural in a conversational way).

You make some good points that I haven't thought about, and they're really concrete things. I don't think any of them are things I usually consider much, though (well, apart from the basic spelling and grammar thing, but then I probably won't even like the fic if it lacks those qualities).

For me the big one is something I can't even put my finger on, and which I often can't predict before I try reading a fic. It has to do with character voices combined with the author's style. I know that there are some characters I have a hard time with. For example, I find Geoffrey Tennant in Slings and Arrows hard to read, despite really liking him as a character. OTOH, I can easily read Billy Tallent in Hard Core Logo, even though I don't identify with him as a character at all--he's just very different from me.

Then there's the author's style. I sometimes really like an author's style, but I can still have a hard time reading it. And different styles and character voices can feel very different for me to read--some make me want to speed up, some make me want to slow down, some make me want to articulate clearly and some make me want to do the opposite.

You make some good points that I haven't thought about
I've been thinking about this post for a couple days now and was kind of surprised at how many I came up with. They're not things I consciously go into a fic look/looking out for but they can make a huge difference on how easy it is to make the podfic or, sometimes, can make me give up on podficcing a fic.

Then there's the author's style. I sometimes really like an author's style, but I can still have a hard time reading it.
*nods* I thought about putting something like that in my post but I couldn't really articulate it that well and it's such a personal thing. Like, I've podficced three stories written by

moirariordan, she's an awesome author, but there are a lot of author's I love. The reason I've done 3 of her stories is because I find them so much easier to read than others.
On the other side of that, there's this one podfic I've made but haven't released yet. Those who have listened to it have said it's good but I had so much trouble making it. It was a 3.5 hour recording for a 1.75hour podfic (I don't think I've ever cut out so much on a single fic). Every time I listen to it, it just sounds *wrong* and unnatural from how I normally am.

I think it probably has something to do with how close the writer's style is to my natural speaking style.

I was looking through my own fics to evaluate their, uh, "podficability" a while ago and noticed that the one with chat excerpts complete with Internet slang that would probably lose most of its effect when spoken. I imagine the same holds true for fics that feature lolspeak or Twitter conversations although I'd be interested to see how podfics might creatively tackle that sort of challenge.

and noticed that the one with chat excerpts complete with Internet slang that would probably lose most of its effect when spoken.
Oh! How could I forget about that! I've definitely gotten a little bored listening to podfics of emails that include header info for each email (really, when you get 10 emails in, I don't want to hear every "Re:" in the subject line).

When I've run across text speech, I'm never sure if I should spell it out or pronounce the words they represent. :-/ It's a judgement call each time.

Or, Drastically Redefining Protocol, it's an amazing story, and

revolutionaryjo is an amazing reader. Except at the end of that fic, the author included all these newsblogs, gossip webpages and a magazine article.

revolutionaryjo did a cool little thing where she started reading them and layered them over each other to indicate the buzz that was created by the actions within the story. Which was neat, but the contents of them were lost to that effect. And they were really part of the story for me, especially the magazine article. They gave us a little glimpse into the future for the characters. So while I appreciated the effect of her ending, I also felt like the story was incomplete but I could see how it might be awkward to read them all, since there were quite a few and were in odd formats.

It's definitely something hard to deal with in podfics.

Partying like it's 1999 here, but if you're still interested in internet chat effects, podcath handled that really well in this podfic of my bandom fic "sing it for the n00bs".

I write to be read aloud because I'm primarily an auditory person. I beta from the same perspective: even reading silently, I'm reading aloud in my head a lot of the time, and repeated words and sounds pop out at me.

One of the difficulties I'm having with the long (long, long!) story I'm slowly chipping away at in podfic now is that, when all's said and done, the writer didn't write to be read aloud. There are a lot of fragmentary sentences, it's not clear where the emphasis should be in a lot of cases, and I've made more mistakes than than I usually do because of it.

The end result is longer editing, a less natural-feeling reading, and (as I'm finding) increasing resistance to sitting down to it again.

When read by eye, the story didn't reveal these characteristics.

So for my own future reference, I promise to take random pages from deep within the story I think I want to record, and try reading them aloud. If I stumble over odd rhythms and fragments, I'd probably be better off choosing a different story to record.

I beta from the same perspective
I've started doing that since I got into podfic. I don't really write fic but when I write meta posts and stuff, I'll read it out loud first. It's a lot easier to catch things that way.

There are a lot of fragmentary sentences, it's not clear where the emphasis should be in a lot of cases, and I've made more mistakes than than I usually do because of it.
I totally understand what you mean. I have a finished podfic that I've been sitting on because, while I have a recording of it from beginning to end, it was painful for me to do. It seemed like the author wrote in sentence fragments and I feel like I got the emphasis wrong quite a few times but I can't seem to work up the energy to rerecord the mistakes.

So for my own future reference, I promise to take random pages from deep within the story I think I want to record, and try reading them aloud.
I have a mostly written podfic tutorial written that I will post some day and one of the first steps I gave was to try reading parts of it out loud to yourself before you get too commited to a story because sometimes, no matter how much you love a story, it's just too much of a headache to record it. My first podfic? I got about 5 hours in (of the recording and editing) before I finally gave up (part of that was that I was too ambitious for a first podfic).

Actually, reading aloud what I've written is an editing tip I learned long ago, and it's invaluable, just in general, for catching errors.

I look forward to your tutorial! With regard to Hard To Record Podfics, what feels like an impossible story one year may seem like a worthwhile challenge the next--as I'm sure you've learned. Technical skill and confidence are certainly a big part of the picture.

This makes me wonder whether I should approach my difficult story one more time. Maybe I've gotten better and it will be easier now!

I completely agree about the value of reading work aloud as an editing tool. It's a test any story *should* be able to pass, IMO, but if nothing else the dialogue should. Far too often I've read dialogue where I just have to look at it and say, "People just don't talk that way." Either in the way the sentence is composed, or in vocabulary choice - something can look good on paper but feel completely unnatural when spoken.

Oh my gosh, this made me think of a story I beta'd. There was a character in the fic who was Jamaican and she had his lines written with a Rastafarian dialect. His lines took me so long to edit because I had to try and do my best attempt at the accent and read each sentence out loud over and over again hoping to get it written out so that it was readable. I didn't record this story as a podfic but just getting it so that looking at the written word you saw the accent was a challenge.

About emphasis...isn't that going to be true of every fic? Someone's always going to read a line slightly differently than the author intended, I'm sure.

There are some basics (at least in English) where it's generally agreed that a certain emphasis has a certain meaning. For instance, I think most English speakers would agree on the different meanings of "You went with him?" and "You went with him?" A straightforward written narrative should make it pretty clear which the reader should use.

I'm talking about odd fragmentary sentences which, by eye, convey a general feeling-meaning (about the characters internal state, for instance) but which really cause me to stumble in reading aloud because suddenly it's not clear how they should be spoken.

It's a style of writing that just was never intended for reading aloud. Not all writing is, and writing that's not is often VERY hard to podfic well.

Hmm, I don't think I really agree! I like there to be vagueness because I like people to make their own decisions about where emphasis should go. That's why I don't use a ton of italics. But at the same time, I am one who hears all writing aloud in my head while writing or reading, so it's not that my writing is not meant to be read aloud. (I can't not hear it aloud!)

Yes, pretty much all of these. I think lack of inquit formulas and excessive repetition are the ones that'll throw me out pretty quickly. Then there's my issue with not being able to handle a huge set of characters so I kinda have a penchant for shack stories (or whatever equivalent :) where you have your two main characters doing most of the speaking and you can keep those voices separate.

As much as I adore experimental stories, I don't think I like to read or listen to them much. I like my straight forward prose for podfic.

Finally, one you didn't mention but that has really puzzled me recently: offensive terminology. It's one thing to read (or glance over); it's another to have to say offensive terms out loud. Even when they're in character, it can affect whether I want to read a story. So that's become a big point for me lately...

I'm not familiar with the term "inquit formulas" could you please explain? (I tried Googling the term but it wasn't much help so I imagine I'm not the only one unfamiliar with the term).

offensive terminology. It's one thing to read (or glance over); it's another to have to say offensive terms out loud. Even when they're in character, it can affect whether I want to read a story. So that's become a big point for me lately...
Definitely. I have one friend that got turned off of an author when she started to notice casual misogyny within her works.

For me, I definitely can't say that I don't swear. In my younger years I even did it a lot but now when I swear, it's because I feel it and it adds to my point. I'm currently working on a podfic with a character who includes some version of "fuck" in every sentence and it's weird for me. I'm uncomfortable saying it so casually, so I keep trying to add meaning when I say it and worry that it's going to come off as over played. :-/ But, on a personal level, I just don't think I can casually say fuck after every sentence.

Yeah, fuck is one thing though and faggot and trannie another...Those were words I had in recent fic and...The first one i ended up saying, because it was Brian fucking Kinney and just seemed in character but...I have to admit I edited the other one and just dropped half a sentence. I doubt anyone would ever notice and the story was so wonderful and...I just totally CHANGED THE TEXT.... *hides head*

Casual misogyny...oh yes. I've been doing older stories, and there's a lot of stuff we wouldn't see any more today. I read one story and it wasn't really bad or really noticeable and I still loved the story to pieces but...I realized my awareness of the issues and my sensitivity level certainly had changed in the last decade!

Also re the constant fuck (I just mistyped as duck :D): In a way a story that relies on expletives may indeed show its underbelly so to speak. In other words, I may be annoyed by the repetitive swearing, but I think they may just be indicative of a story I might not enjoy otherwise....

My pet peeve...J2 and their douche bags. do not want!!!!

I have to admit I edited the other one and just dropped half a sentence. I doubt anyone would ever notice and the story was so wonderful and...I just totally CHANGED THE TEXT.
I get that. If you can change it, without it changing the atmosphere of the story it's probably not a bad idea. Sometimes an author doesn't realize how offensive a statement can be, other times they used it specifically to provoke that reaction. If I had done the former, I would probably appreciate the editing, if it were the latter... that could be problematic.

I do so appreciate it when an author says it's ok to edit their works when you podfic. Historically I would podfic a story and ask permission later, so never felt I could change things up, however lately I've been getting permission first, sometimes even involving the author in my podficcing process and it can be so useful when they let you change things up a bit.

Casual misogyny...oh yes. I've been doing older stories, and there's a lot of stuff we wouldn't see any more today
And there are a lot of things that are commonly written today that can hit some people's buttons. I know I've seen more than one person get upset over the comparison to a "14 year old girl" (or similar age). It's really common but it's also problematic how it's used.
I think misogyny can be especially weird in slash because there are things that can be said by women that sound misogynistic coming from a man. And while slash fandom is primarily women talking to other women, we often talk through boys giving it an off feel at times.

I agree with all the items on your list, and would like to add sex noises and the like. I don't mind reading porn aloud, but definitely feel awkward/uncomfortable when the gasps, moans, pleas and other noises are actually verbalized. Mainly, I feel those things are hot in the text where we have the choice of imagining the character in our heads, but as a reader I find it problematic: reading it straight is awkward and potentially silly, as often they're sounds and half-formed words. Performing it, however, is also problematic, as it makes me feel self-conscious and I'm sure that bleeds out into the fic, making the listener self-conscious, and hello to un-sexy.

This can also be applied, of course, to other instances of noise - screaming, for example.

I also agree with

podcath's comment on experimental stories - some of those styles can be exquisite in text form, but I doubt much of it would translate well to spoken word. (however, now that I think on it some more, some of it might translate *very* well, since some of the stories I'm thinking of rely heavily on pacing and emphasis to get the feel across. Hmm. There's one for

podfic_bingo...)

I don't mind reading porn aloud, but definitely feel awkward/uncomfortable when the gasps, moans, pleas and other noises are actually verbalized.
I squicked myself the first time I tried to do sex noises. I've gotten more used to it now though (umm, you might not want to listen to my latest podfic if sex noises bother you, I swear 50% of the dialog was sex noises :S).

Oddly enough, it's dirty talk that scares the shit out of me now (but I've been squicked by how other podficcers have done dirty talk so that could be why). It's just... there are somethings that sound awesome in the heat of the moment or when you're reading over them but sound completely ridiculous when said aloud. Or, now that I think about it, it's the dirty talk that has that derogatory edge that can throw me out like whoa. Like calling someone slutty or similar. I can totally find it hot in a fic but the wrongness of the statement stands out when it's spoken out loud.

however, now that I think on it some more, some of it might translate *very* well, since some of the stories I'm thinking of rely heavily on pacing and emphasis to get the feel across
I think that's definitely happened (although I guess it depends on the definition of "experimental stories"). Written by the Victors comes to mind. (The musical podfic I'm planning will hopefully fall into the "success" column)

Ah, ITA to dirty talk - honestly, even in the "heat of the moment" reading the fic, a lot of the time I'm not a fan. Definitely can't see myself pulling it off as a podficcer.

I'll let you know how I feel about your

jeyhawk reading. ;)

Good points, and I know that after reading asides in a sentence, I write them a whole lot less. Also, my vocabulary has improved since I've ended up looking up bunches of words to see what they mean and how to pronounce them. Dictionary.com is my friend.

A lot of my podfics are done for a charity auction and the bidder picks the story, so I just try and do my best with the story, even if it's one I might not have picked myself to record.

Laurie

Dictionary.com is my friend.
Dictionary.com is indeed awesome. However the downside to that is you need to know that you don't know how to pronounce a word. :P There are words I've been saying for years in my head, and saying incorrectly. I'm always paranoid that I'll hit one of those words in a podfic and just horrible mispronounce it and not know :S I suppose that's what betas are for.

A lot of my podfics are done for a charity auction and the bidder picks the story, so I just try and do my best with the story, even if it's one I might not have picked myself to record.
I'm in that boat right now and I think it's kind of making these things clearer for me. I was unconsciously qualifying every fic I read for podficability so would steer clear of podficcing certain fics. Then I'm handed one that hasn't had that kind of qualifying and have to make it work. It made me realize just how much I qualify fics before podficcing them.

I thought of another one today. Sometimes fics with changing POVs or non-linear timelines can be confusing (even on paper). I was listening to a podfic today whose story has a lot of flash backs and I could never really tell when something was happening, there wasn't really any indication. With fic, some authors will italicize flashbacks or will use a divider to show a change, which can be missing in the audio version.

I've definitely seen podficcers handle this kind of thing well but it takes extra thought so I could see it turning some podficcers off of doing those kinds of stories.

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What makes a fic podficcable or unpodficcable?

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