From Roga

[zvi]

Roga would like to talk about re-editing and re-writing works for podficcing.

Would readers be interested in editing works for podficcing, whether for content (e.g. sex scenes), length, adding dialogue tags, etc.? Does "permission to record" cover a blanket "permission to adapt"?

How would authors feel about re-writing stories so they are easier to be read or to be understood orally? For instance, if your alien language just isn't pronounceable by human beings, or if you've written something in an experimental, visual structure.

And, Roga didn't ask this, but I would like to know, how would we, as listeners, react to getting a story that was changed from the text? How extensive would the changes have to be for you to want a heads up before you downloaded? Would you want the changes indicated in the metadata or also during the story reading?

Comments

[dmarley]

Wow. This actually hadn't occurred to me before, but I know that I've made minor edits as I've read my own stuff. Mostly it's been for the sake of clarity--replacing a pronoun with a name, tweaking word order, breaking up sentences, etc. As a writer, I certainly wouldn't have a problem with a reader making silent edits of that nature. I'd maybe want a note in the metadata if the edits were in the line of removing or extensively re-working more than a few sentences or a paragraph or two, but I personally wouldn't require permission from the reader (and now I have to go edit my permission statement again ;)).

As a listener, I think I'd prefer changes to be noted at the beginning or in the metadata, not in the actual reading. That said, I can also think of circumstances where audio cues during the story might be helpful, but not outright asides if that makes any sense.

And, yeah, I'd like to know if any major re-writing or re-working was done because otherwise I'd go nuts waiting for favorite parts of the story to happen and be jarred if they happened out of order or not at all.

[brimtoast]

This is a very interesting topic. Yay, roga!

When I read I stray from the text a very slight amount sometimes, along the lines of turning two words into a contraction in dialogue, if that sounds more natural. Or correcting something if it a clear typo.

Anything beyond that, and I won't make a change without explicit author permission. The piece I am working on right now has the word "tortuous" in a place that I was pretty sure the author meant "torturous." I recorded tortuous because that's what the text said, but I felt uneasy about it. Then I realized the author is a friend of mine, and I could just ask her to clarify. She said that yeah, she *had* meant torturous, and then I was comfortable going in and fixing it. But I wouldn't have fixed it if I couldn't ask first, I don't think. I would err on the side of sticking to the text.

If a person were uncomfortable with reading a scene and wanted to go to the author to request a revised version for reading aloud, that would seem reasonable to me, I guess. Although if it's because of content or length, I'd kind of feel like the reader should just choose a different story. The adding dialogue tags thing is a more understandable reason to ask for rewrites, although I would be more impressed with the reader if they just took it as a challenge to really work at making the different speakers in the scene distinguishable.

So I guess my overall verdict is that asking for rewrites is reasonable as a course of action, but it seems even better to choose a story in the first place that you don't need rewrites for, and to take the parts that you're unsure of as challenges, rather than trying to get them changed.

[darkemeralds]

I seem to be developing a pattern of listening to podfics that I've never read, and reading fics that I probably won't listen to. So as a reader/listener, I'm not sure text changes would ever make a difference to me.

I've undertaken more than one podfic as a recorder that turned out to be really hard to podfic for some of the reasons you mention. In one case I just found something more straightforward to record. In another, I soldiered through, hoping the narrative structure would work. I don't think I'd be inclined to do any significant re-writing or re-structuring of someone else's work.

As a writer, I'd prefer to be asked about textual changes, but I understand podfic as a transformative work, essentially out of my hands.

[podcath]

I think I already answered in the original post (sorry Zvi, I didn't realize this was only the collection post :), but I'll post here again as well. I think minimal changes should be expected in terms of silently correcting typos or contracting in dialog.

But what Roga was talking about really unsettles me a bit. They mostly described it in terms of taking out NC17 material, and i find that very problematic. If the story is good, the sex scenes ought to be central to the story and "cleaning it up" is an incisive move. If someone doesn't want to read sex scenes (and that's understandable), they might look at the vast array of non-NC17 stories.

The issue that i find more problematic for myself is language I disapprove of. So far, I think i've just avoided reading such stories out loud. But if there's ablist or misogynist or racist or homophobic language...I'm not sure I'd want to read it and i'm not sure I'd feel comfortable changing it. So I've avoided the issue at least so far.

[zvi]

I've actually had this happen to me, as a writer whose work was read by someone else. Not that I was asked for changes, and the changes were slight, so I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but Friendly Misdirection has a couple of word order changes that change the meaning of the sentences they're in, and it's frustrating, for me as an author, to have the story changed. They're not big changes, but it's enough that the story isn't exactly the one I wrote down and published.

[dodificus]

As a listener the idea of getting an abridged version of a story kind of freaks me out, if the reader mentioned it in the podfic post then I would definitely not download. Not every story can work as a podfic, not every story can be right for *you* to read as a podfic. If it isn't then I suggest you give it a miss, let someone else do it or leave it to be appreciated in text form only.

And I 100% believe that permission to record DOES NOT equal permission to adapt.

[roga]

First of all, yay for everyone talking about this :-) It's really interesting to hear both what people are already doing (which kind of changes you're making while recording), and which kind of adaptations people think might be acceptable.

Personally, I think that other than the kind of obvious typos and maybe the occasional contraction (wanna instead of want to, etc), which the reader can make by themselves, any other change should come with author permission. I do think that there certain changes one can make to a fic to make it better understood when read out loud, like the example of dialogue tags, or Zvi's example of alien languages, and that they should be run by the author. Or really, there are two ways to do this: 1. The author gives the reader blanket permission to make those kinds of changes as the reader sees fit, which could work if the author trusts the reader, or feels less ownership over the text in other media. 2. The reader marks the changes they plan on making and sends them to the author for approval.

As for sex scenes, I brought up the subject for two reasons:

The first is because specifically for me, at least -- and I do wonder if I'm the only feeling this -- reading porn and listening to porn are two entirely different things, and while I am very comfortable with the former, the latter kind of squicks me. Maybe it's the fact that it feels like I'm not alone (there's someone reading porn in my ear); maybe it's the fact that the atmosphere of a written sex scene is very hard to capture in a way that I find hot in audio. The pacing of the scene is crucial, and hard to transfer to audio; a lot of what I find hot in porn is sounds, grunts and moans and gasps and sometimes just uttered syllables, and I usually find them very awkward in podfic.

The second is for similar reasons, but from the readers' POV. I'm sure, though it's not a scientific study, that there are podfic readers who are uncomfortable reading explicit scenes -- either because the scenes are difficult to do right, or because they're afraid of somehow being linked to it one day from their RL identities. And we can say, fine, then those readers should just restrict themselves to non-explicit fic, but: there's a lot of really amazing fic that could still be amazing if it weren't explicit that it would be a shame to pass up on for just that reason, and besides, the podficcing world isn't so big, and it would be a shame for readers, who might be really awesome, not to record certain fics for that reason.

I'm by no means trying to say that podfics should always be censored or anything. But I do think it would be cool to have that kind of adaptation option, if the author permits it and if the reader wants it -- just to have it floating around in the fannish consciousness that it's a possibility, which is why I brought it up in the first place. I remember there used to be fics that offered PG-13 and NC-17 versions of the same story, back in... a long time ago. It's been done before; it's more tricky with podfic, because of the issue of changing the text that someone else has written (or trying to convince the author to dedicate it time and do it themselves for your reading benefit).

Like I said, I'd love for this to just be an option that's out there for people to consider, both authors and readers. I can imagine it going in a couple of different ways:

*The author rewriting an explicit sex scene into something less explicit, maybe rated R or PG-13, for the purpose of podficcing.

*The reader rewriting the scene in the same manner, with the author's permission and approval of the final product before recording it.

*Maybe even recording two versions of the same story with different ratings, although I'm sure readers probably won't bother.

In any case, fics adapted in such a way should have a disclaimer, both on the downloading page and somewhere in the metadata, saying they've been altered from the original into a lower rating.

There are many fics in which sex scenes are essential. And whether they're essential or not, if the author doesn't want the fics changed then they shouldn't be changed. But there are also a lot of long, awesome, shippy fics that don't have to have explicit sex scenes to be awesome, and I'd love to have them more easily available for the (few? many? I have no idea) like me who'd rather read NC-17 scenes in writing than have them narrated in my ear.

And to answer Zvi's last point: as a listener, I would have no problem whatsover getting a story that was changed from the original text as long as it had the author's seal of approval/permission. I wouldn't want the specific changes indicated in neither the metadata nor the reading; I'd want the change acknowledged in the metadata, but anything beyond that I'd prefer to read in a post online at a later time, if at all.

[anatsuno]

Funny, but as much as I lobby for podfic being thought of as its own transformative work (and not just an accessibility thing), etc, I cannot stand the idea of altering the text. I alter it less than theatre actors; I was shocked when I read what jinjurly wrote once about changing all the 'shhh' in fic she records into 'shush', because that's the sort of change I forbid myself as a reader.

It has meant, as a podfic artist, that there are a lot of stories I enjoyed reading which I could not record because there were grammar issues or sentence flow issues that I could simply not record properly as written; either mistakes or not, they were features of the texts that means we did not match, and there was nothing I envision I could do about it. Even now if I was given the liberty to change stuff and edit the text I'm going to record, I think I would feel very freaked out about it (even though for some stories it might be edits I have dreamed of doing for my own reading pleasure - I have only dreamed of it and never changed the story).

So yeah, anyway - the removal of sex scenes feels particularly shocking to me. As much as I understand the idea that no one receives the same work of art the same way, and audience reception is important to respect as are accessibility issues, etc, I also feel there has to be limits to what 'a work' is, you know? If we edit a story to record it without the sex, or with less misogyny, or removing the swear words, for me it's not the same story anymore, it's not the same 'work'.

And works are SO abundant, really, that I tend to feel like if work X has features 1, 2 and 3 that bother you, your role as audience is to pick another work (and/or critique work X on those grounds, whatever; I'm not suggesting people shouldn't interact with works they don't thoroughly enjoy), because there IS another work out there that matches your tastes, surely.

I dunno, I just, whoa. It's really a topic that freaks me out I guess.

[blacksquirrel]

As others have already noted, I just wanted to chime in and say wow - I hadn't considered this possibility and it should definitely be on the table for discussion. Thanks for raising the issue.

[bell]

As someone who has been podficced and made a couple of unpublished podfics... I'm for adaptation! For fewer conflicts & problems I think it'd be best if the person asked the author for permission first-- authors will feel differently about having their works transformed and their wishes ought to be respected. If they want each word preserved, that's cool.

Myself, I write for an audience that'll be reading through written text. If a podficcer told me that changing some wordings would improve the text in audio format, I'd give them the green light. I'd also be interested to see what deeper changes someone might want to make, in changing rating or shortening a scene etc. I'd want to know why and how, but... I'd like to try to be fairly flexible. Of course I'd refuse certain things-- such as the insertion of racist content-- but if the podficcer suggested changes that improved the fic/podfic, I'd love that! I know my work is flawed and I'd like to see suggestions on how to improve it.

In a way, I think a podfic does change the original story in and of itself. By giving vocal intonation, determining the pace of the reading, and so forth, it's not quite the original version. It's transformative! And since the entire enterprise of fic is transformative, I personally wouldn't want to say "but no the changes stop here." I want other people to be able to take my creations and change it so it's how they see it, much as I took someone else's work and fiddled it to fit my vision. (Which makes me think-- what if instead of releasing a remix fic in written format, it were released as an a podfic?)

Of course, I can see why other people wouldn't want adaptations of their own works and again I think such wishes should be respected. I also wanted to throw out some ideas supporting the notion of adaptation.