podfic recommendation and the case for BP
Oct. 25th, 2017 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaixoI’d like to recommend the podfic Loose Ends by ItsADrizzit and in the same breath, make the case for fanfic writers to allow a Blanket Permission statement if they are moved to, because the process can be enriching.
On the face of it, I’d feel weird recommending a story I wrote to anyone, but really, after what ItsADrizzit did to and for the story, it isn’t mine anymore, and I’ll freely admit it.
In the podfic, they actually took the words on the screen, and created a world. In their hands (or voice), the fic comes alive in the best ways. The characters exist in terms of being in places, answering phones and bumping into things. They stack crockery, are poured into taxis; they answer phones, take showers, play instruments, and make things.
By the end of it all, the podfic is an experience that’s been lived, with people that you come away knowing.
The gist of the story is this: Eric Dier, an aristocrat flirting with disaster, has found himself suspended from his family's firm due to his inability to control his drinking. Dele Alli is back in London, in between music gigs and battling with family affairs that he'd rather avoid, thank you very much. Both of them meet in a bar in London on a Tuesday, and the story starts from there.
That’s pretty much the plot.
However, in its podifc form, the summary of the story is a door to another world; because the podficcer uses the tools of the soundscape to open the door and haul you in there. For example, In the writing of this fic, I found myself hamstrung into trying to describe the mood of the music, because it can be difficult. You don’t want to bore the layperson with specific music terms, but if you handwave too much, it gets lost as narrative noise.
This doesn’t happen in the podfic.
From the start, the dark, slinky beats of Tricky sets the scene that the story is going to be steeped in sound; and in chapters six and seven, we hear and feel the extent of how the music threads itself into this story. Now, the genre of music might not be your thing, but the fact that you can hear it and react to it in the same time that Eric does, is all sorts of awesome. In chapter nine, when there’s a key moment in the fic, when everyone else is off their minds enjoying the din of the music, ItsADrizzit pulls back on the music and pushes the characters’ voices into the foreground, which sets events into motion.
By the time the last chapter ends and it has been read, you’ve already lived the entire existence of the length of the fic, and it’s supremely cathartic and enjoyable.
That being said, after listening to the fic, I can understand why a fanfic writer might not want to give blanket permissions to a podficcer, because the phrase “ transformative works” isn’t a broad term; there’s actual power in the phrasing. As in, once someone else touches ‘your story’, it really isn’t ‘yours’ anymore, because they bring their viewpoints, their background, their voice. You can’t discount the universe of another human being, and how they change the things that they touch, and in a lot of ways, as I listened to the podfic, the story stopped being mine.
For context, some background: I wrote the story for a prompt from someone’s Tumblr. When I do write prompts, I tend to hit certain marks, like anyone would when it comes to say, doing floor exercises. You know the moves and their degrees of difficulty, and at the end, you stick the landing even if you break your ankle.
The analogy is similar to writing a prompt (not in terms of difficulty, mind, but in terms of things asked, expected and delivered). I remember writing this story in a haze, but having an idea of what the prompter wanted, and hitting said marks. I remember what I wanted the mood and ending to be, and hoped it suited. On paper, the fic comes across as relatively straightforward emotionally to the point of linear, but in podfic, it altered.
Don’t get me wrong. The words and the plot are unchanged; word for word, the podfic is what I wrote, but the human voice does the most incredible things to written text.
For instance, when listening to the podfic, there were certain emotional aspects of the fic the reading stressed that I didn’t even think about. In chapter seven, there’s a scene where Dele is DJ’ing, and showing his work and Eric is seeing Dele showing his work, and is impressed by it and him, so when Chapter nine comes around and something happens, it’s pretty organic and a lot more intense.
Hearing your words in someone else’s voice is going to be strange at first, especially since it’s not your voice, nor the voices that the characters speak (for instance, I’m a Brit, and the characters in question are British, but ItsADrizzit isn’t), but ItsADrizzit infuses so much warmth and emotion in the reading, you get over the sound of what your characters should sound like relatively quickly, and you plug into the feelings of the fic almost immediately.
ItsADrizzit was generous enough to ask me about the music influences I had in terms of this bit of fic (they really didn’t have to ask, and I wouldn’t have offered otherwise ). They then folded it into their own viewpoints what they interpreted the music to be as described in the text when it needed to be specific, and later on in the story when the text just hand waved the rest, they really ran with the brief of creativity. It was a fun interlude before the rest of the story wrapped up.
By the time the story was finished, I was really pleased with the effort, because ItsADrizzit made the story a lot bigger than it was. For two hours, you had the characters living and reacting and responding to things in a dynamic way; their voices alive with the breadth of emotion; from tentative inquiry, to the affection and irritation of familiarity to the giddiness of requited love at the end - it was really something.
All this to say: if you’re a writer who’s precious about their own words, and you have an idea of what your story should be in your head and how your characters should sound- don’t give out blanket statements; slap a notice on your work, ringfence it and call it good.
That being said, I’ll give you fair warning; you’re missing out on so much if you do.
There’s power in hearing the cold pixels of text brought to life by a voice that cracks with warmth or has the sleek face of coolness at the same time. There’s a wonder in finding out what aspects of your work the podficcer warms to, versus the bits that they see as ‘narrative noise’. There are lines that you, the writer might see as something as a throwaway, but in the podficcer’s voice there’s an underlying depth and breadth of feeling to the line that underscores an emotional depth to the fic.
On top of that, there’s the generosity of time and effort that the reader puts into the fic in order to map the soundscapes of one’s mind, and to hand it over to a fanfic culture that might pass on it because of factors no one can even imagine, much less buffer against, is quite daunting.
I don’t know how to end this any more elegantly than this; have a think about transformative works and what they can do, and after that, put a blanket permission (or prohibition) on your work. Give podficcers a chance to riff on your work, the result might surprise and delight you.
On the face of it, I’d feel weird recommending a story I wrote to anyone, but really, after what ItsADrizzit did to and for the story, it isn’t mine anymore, and I’ll freely admit it.
In the podfic, they actually took the words on the screen, and created a world. In their hands (or voice), the fic comes alive in the best ways. The characters exist in terms of being in places, answering phones and bumping into things. They stack crockery, are poured into taxis; they answer phones, take showers, play instruments, and make things.
By the end of it all, the podfic is an experience that’s been lived, with people that you come away knowing.
The gist of the story is this: Eric Dier, an aristocrat flirting with disaster, has found himself suspended from his family's firm due to his inability to control his drinking. Dele Alli is back in London, in between music gigs and battling with family affairs that he'd rather avoid, thank you very much. Both of them meet in a bar in London on a Tuesday, and the story starts from there.
That’s pretty much the plot.
However, in its podifc form, the summary of the story is a door to another world; because the podficcer uses the tools of the soundscape to open the door and haul you in there. For example, In the writing of this fic, I found myself hamstrung into trying to describe the mood of the music, because it can be difficult. You don’t want to bore the layperson with specific music terms, but if you handwave too much, it gets lost as narrative noise.
This doesn’t happen in the podfic.
From the start, the dark, slinky beats of Tricky sets the scene that the story is going to be steeped in sound; and in chapters six and seven, we hear and feel the extent of how the music threads itself into this story. Now, the genre of music might not be your thing, but the fact that you can hear it and react to it in the same time that Eric does, is all sorts of awesome. In chapter nine, when there’s a key moment in the fic, when everyone else is off their minds enjoying the din of the music, ItsADrizzit pulls back on the music and pushes the characters’ voices into the foreground, which sets events into motion.
By the time the last chapter ends and it has been read, you’ve already lived the entire existence of the length of the fic, and it’s supremely cathartic and enjoyable.
That being said, after listening to the fic, I can understand why a fanfic writer might not want to give blanket permissions to a podficcer, because the phrase “ transformative works” isn’t a broad term; there’s actual power in the phrasing. As in, once someone else touches ‘your story’, it really isn’t ‘yours’ anymore, because they bring their viewpoints, their background, their voice. You can’t discount the universe of another human being, and how they change the things that they touch, and in a lot of ways, as I listened to the podfic, the story stopped being mine.
For context, some background: I wrote the story for a prompt from someone’s Tumblr. When I do write prompts, I tend to hit certain marks, like anyone would when it comes to say, doing floor exercises. You know the moves and their degrees of difficulty, and at the end, you stick the landing even if you break your ankle.
The analogy is similar to writing a prompt (not in terms of difficulty, mind, but in terms of things asked, expected and delivered). I remember writing this story in a haze, but having an idea of what the prompter wanted, and hitting said marks. I remember what I wanted the mood and ending to be, and hoped it suited. On paper, the fic comes across as relatively straightforward emotionally to the point of linear, but in podfic, it altered.
Don’t get me wrong. The words and the plot are unchanged; word for word, the podfic is what I wrote, but the human voice does the most incredible things to written text.
For instance, when listening to the podfic, there were certain emotional aspects of the fic the reading stressed that I didn’t even think about. In chapter seven, there’s a scene where Dele is DJ’ing, and showing his work and Eric is seeing Dele showing his work, and is impressed by it and him, so when Chapter nine comes around and something happens, it’s pretty organic and a lot more intense.
Hearing your words in someone else’s voice is going to be strange at first, especially since it’s not your voice, nor the voices that the characters speak (for instance, I’m a Brit, and the characters in question are British, but ItsADrizzit isn’t), but ItsADrizzit infuses so much warmth and emotion in the reading, you get over the sound of what your characters should sound like relatively quickly, and you plug into the feelings of the fic almost immediately.
ItsADrizzit was generous enough to ask me about the music influences I had in terms of this bit of fic (they really didn’t have to ask, and I wouldn’t have offered otherwise ). They then folded it into their own viewpoints what they interpreted the music to be as described in the text when it needed to be specific, and later on in the story when the text just hand waved the rest, they really ran with the brief of creativity. It was a fun interlude before the rest of the story wrapped up.
By the time the story was finished, I was really pleased with the effort, because ItsADrizzit made the story a lot bigger than it was. For two hours, you had the characters living and reacting and responding to things in a dynamic way; their voices alive with the breadth of emotion; from tentative inquiry, to the affection and irritation of familiarity to the giddiness of requited love at the end - it was really something.
All this to say: if you’re a writer who’s precious about their own words, and you have an idea of what your story should be in your head and how your characters should sound- don’t give out blanket statements; slap a notice on your work, ringfence it and call it good.
That being said, I’ll give you fair warning; you’re missing out on so much if you do.
There’s power in hearing the cold pixels of text brought to life by a voice that cracks with warmth or has the sleek face of coolness at the same time. There’s a wonder in finding out what aspects of your work the podficcer warms to, versus the bits that they see as ‘narrative noise’. There are lines that you, the writer might see as something as a throwaway, but in the podficcer’s voice there’s an underlying depth and breadth of feeling to the line that underscores an emotional depth to the fic.
On top of that, there’s the generosity of time and effort that the reader puts into the fic in order to map the soundscapes of one’s mind, and to hand it over to a fanfic culture that might pass on it because of factors no one can even imagine, much less buffer against, is quite daunting.
I don’t know how to end this any more elegantly than this; have a think about transformative works and what they can do, and after that, put a blanket permission (or prohibition) on your work. Give podficcers a chance to riff on your work, the result might surprise and delight you.
