kaixo

Last year,

analise010 asked me to write a bespoke fic for

itsadrizzit as a Christmas present. I'd write the fic, and she'd do podfic for it. Long story short, we were collaborating on a podficcation for an audience of one.

As promised, I ended up writing two fics and she chose one(the process is detailed here). With the other fic, I didn't want to have it go a begging, because I knew

itsadrizzit prefers to consume fic via audio than reading, so I asked a mod from the Informal Podfic Exchange if they could please do me a favour and have a podficcer read the second story for me, and I got the incomparable and generous

rscreighton.

Fast forward, I'm listening to the podfic of both readers, and realised belatedly that the fics I'd written for

analise010 didn't fit

rscreighton's voice. Oh,

rscreighton rocked it out and made it work. However, both voices had such distinct cadences and rhythms, I realised that I'd misstepped. The snarky notes of the fic I'd given her had been tailored for

analise010's spirited, snarky vibe versus

rscreighton's low, smooth croon of a voice.

rscreighton read the fic really well. She got the emotional beats (and more) which were expressed in the fic, but ... something didn't sit right with me at all. After a few days stewing about why, I thought I'd give it another go, and I had another opportunity.

itsadrizzit's birthday would be three weeks later. I asked

rscreighton if she could podfic another fic for

itsadrizzit's birthday and she said yes.

I took down the actual fic to be podficced (it had already been posted for

itsadrizzit a while back), read through. Edited and retweaked it to match the rhythms of

rscreighton's voice. This involved things such as, tweaking key emotional sentences to make them shorter for her voice to have more of an effect. Making other sentences longer for the mood, but varying them with the pace of her voice (in the first fic, how I wrote it, it forced her to rush the end of the sentences).

Changers included but weren't limited to the following: shaving off dialogue tags, expanding the group bits (where there were four or more people talking) because she was good at those things, with each person having their own distinctive voice and the give and take between the characters.

I reposted the fic, and asked her if she could read it a tad slower for the beats to strike home, and she did.

I listened to the fic, and yeah, I was happier about it, because it suited

rscreightons metre, and flow. It was perfect, because I tweaked the fic to suit the lift and roll of her voice.

Now, granted,

rscreightonhad a lot to do in this fic. Firstly, it's a fic about European football, and the names were different (e.g. Ajax is pronounced AI YAX, Tottenham is something like Tott'num), there were Dutch phrases galore, and the lad lived in Turkey, so there were Turkish phrases there as well. I assured her that she didn't have to go Dutch (heh) and had English phrases to hand, but she decided to do the whole floor exercise and stuck the landing like an exclamation point.

As always, my deepest, warmest thanks,

rscreighton.

There's a reason why I've explained this situation at length. In light of a podfic/writer collab, from what I've gathered, writers tend to write the thing and hand over the document to the podficcers for their reading of it. However, as a writer who has had her work podficced, be it via drive-by podficcing due to the BP statement in my profile, as well as directly working with podficcers, here are a few observations I've taken away from the extent of my engagement.

Know your reader's voice: What parts of their delivery take your fancy? I'm not talking about their accent, because everyone has one. I'm talking about their actual performance. What sticks with you? With analise010 I remember downloading a podfic (Brooklyn 99, I think), and listening to it a few times and scribbled my impressions down. With each listen, I noted which parts of her delivery stuck with me. After some reflection, I remembered the snark, so when I wrote the fic, I made the main character (Christian) sarcastic. There's a line when he goes, "I can't hear you over my bad choices" that she puts so much spark and snap to it, it really sets up the fic (and Christian as a bit hardheaded). I noted when it came to give and take with two characters and dialogue, she would be up for it, so I tended to write a lot of scenes around sharper dialogue because she made it playful without making the words sound mean (while still keeping in the spirit of the fic)

Centre your podficcer: As in, find out what your podficcer is comfortable with and work with them. To quote Captain Awkward, use your words. Communicate and negotiate. For instance, I asked analise010 if she'd be comfortable if there were explicit scenes in the fic, she said yes. Speaking Dutch sentences, she said no. We made it work. In the fic itself, there's the Dutch translation, but in the podfic, it's in English. There are a few passages where she tweaked them in order to fit her voice, and in the story the passages are a bit longer. That's fine, because analise010 was comfortable with the words to fit her voice and word bounce. The words on the page are slightly different and the sentences longer, and that's the way of it. The idea is for the podficcer to feel at ease reading your work, and sometimes, you gotta give to get.

If and when applicable, make a pronunciation guide : I'm a Brit, writing about European football. Even in monolingual Britain, we're still exposed to European pronunciation, due to the foreign coaches and players in the league (mostly European, with a lot of French and Belgian players). So we are introduced to different ways of saying names. For example, here are a few words, note how they look, vs how they sound Dzeko ( Jeh- ko), Jan (YAN), Ajax (AI YAX). Sevilla (SI VEE- YA). Some English names are pronounced differently from how they're written: Tottenham (Tott'num), Leicester (Lester). West Brom (West Brum), Man City (Man Citeh).

For an American coming to the fandom blind, they won't necessarily know these things unless they follow European football. If you're in that kind of place where you have doubts about the podficcer knowing how things are said, please draw up and hand over pronunciation guides. Go through your fic, and make notes on which words might trip your podficcer up and put it in the guide. With me, I not only break it down phonetically, but I do link to audio files as well. I'll do it just to save the podficcer some time. Of course, if both of you are in the same fandom and know the house rules re: pronunciation, disregard this bit.

Make your work podfic friendly When it comes to writing, and you're writing for yourself, you can have the sentences wander unceasingly like James Joyce's Ulysses. Or do your version of the Who Is John Galt? ¹. You can have dialogue tags everywhere and go crazy with the format. From my experience, things that work on the screen when reading in the quiet of your mind, will be confusing when read aloud.

In this light, be open to making the fic podfic reader friendly. Shave off excessive dialogue tags. Vary sentence lengths. Sharpen your punctuation skills, because podficcers know and will exploit the difference of the weighted pauses: be it a comma, semicolon, colon and pause. If and when you're doing scene transitions, work on them being smoothed out (bearing in mind that podficcers do chimes/music cues for said transitions, because a pause can be interpreted as dead air). Make your writing as clear as glass. This can be in terms of either expressing your ideas in a simpler way or making your sentences shorter. Even if it means reading the story aloud yourself, just do it.

stay in your lane: As in, you're the writer. You've written the thing: you've identified your podficcer's strengths, have written to exploit them. Pronunciation guides have been handed over and accepted in good faith. You've tweaked your work to be podfic friendly. Once you've handed over the document, your work is done. It's for the podficcer to do their art, and this is the time to stay out of their way. Podfic is the intersection of technicalities and art, with the x-factor of their voice.

That being said, if they do ask you for suggestions, make some. Or if you see a few photos for reference that might help them with making covers, hand a few over. I remember when itsadrizzit and I were talking about her podficcing loose ends and I said I thought the fic could take sound effects. itsadrizzit agreed, and I sent some links to the soundscape of what I thought suited the fic. Left her to it, and didn't hear the work until it's done. Or when rscreighton read the first fic and asked me if I wanted to listen to it before it went live, I demurred, because she already had 500 podfics to her AO3 account, and I still can't get my head around Garageband, so, lol, no. But here are a few photos which might help you with the cover art

That's enough to be going on with, I think. Once you're doing a collab with a podficcer, it's a bit more involved than say, writing a fanfic for a fanmix, or even a fanart. Fan mixes and fanart can focus on a part of the fic, wherein podfic engages with the entire body of the work. From reading, to invisible beta'ing (in terms of having the highest sound quality possible, and no distractions in the immediate background of the reading) to even their choice of cover art. As a writer in a collab, you realise that there are things that you will have to give up in order to make the product be its best. In addition, having a hand in seeing/hearing your work transform is a bewitching thing.

On top of that, having a few works of mine podficced actually forced me to change my writing style for the better, but that's a whole other admittedly niche post (as if this topic isn't niche enough).

Right, I hope this helps! Any questions, or matters of clarification, do not hesitate to ask. Please refer to the posts for context at the end of this post.

Footnotes
_{1_{^{The John Galt speech is SIXTY pages long, and a huge block of text, so that his voice is a torrent raging through the reader's mind with no letup. In audio, this isn't very effective, I've found.}

Posts for context

Podfic recommendation and the case for BPhere

Exchange between myself and itsadrizzit over in tumblr concerning podfic here and here}}