What makes a fic podficcable or unpodficcable?

[paraka]

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?

Comments

[darkemeralds]

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.

[paraka]

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).

[darkemeralds]

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!

[choosetolive]

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.

[froggyfun365]

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.

[torachan]

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.

[darkemeralds]

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.

[torachan]

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!)