Author: Eneasz

It never fails to infuriate me when someone comments about how they “got out of” jury duty, or conversely, complains that they couldn’t get out of it. When I served on a jury a few years ago I had to repeatedly rebuff friends and coworkers who tried to offer me their condolences. The judicial system won’t work if all the smartest people focus their efforts on shirking this responsibility. If I’m ever up on false charges, or in a dispute with a neighbor, I want my jury to be the brightest and best of the population. There isn’t a lot I can do to make that more likely, but there are a few things, and one of those is to heap scorn on those who try to wriggle out of jury duty, and praise those who make the effort to be the best jurors they can. Serving on a jury is a thing of pride, and anyone who tries to make it seem like anything undesirable is immediately told why they are wrong, and that I won’t participate in their “joking”. Otherwise we may fall back into Wizengamot-like political feuding where the powerful are above justice and the masses are beneath it.

When I began the podcast, it was my intention to simply and faithfully transfer every written word into audio without making any changes. The work was excellent as written, I certainly didn’t have any of the skills to improve on it (nor the chutzpah to think I should), and I felt that to alter any author’s words without their permission was sacrilege. I hold my nose at abridged versions of audio books.

As soon as I integrated other people’s voices into the podcast I realized this was more than a bit naive  I was immediately hit with lines that were delivered in a manner very different from how I had read them, and yet I could not say that they were wrong. In fact I was often pleasantly surprised to find an interpretation of a line or character that played much better than I had done it. It dawned on me that simply by reading this in my voice, using my inflection and my emphasis, I was very likely subtly altering what the author had intended when he was writing it. Much as no plan survives contact with the enemy, no artistic intent survives contact with the audience.

(This also allowed me to not beat myself up too much when I let technical slips pass through that didn’t alter the meaning, as mentioned a few notes previously)

I did, however, still try to keep as literal of a reading as I could. After the cast had reached a certain size I got a note from a listener pointing out that with so many unique voices, I no longer needed to interject “said Harry/Dumbledore/whoever” constantly. It’s a requirement for the written word, and any skilled reader barely even registers them as s/he reads, but they were distracting in audio and entirely unnecessary. I felt kinda foolish for not having come to this conclusion on my own, I guess the transition to other people was so gradual I didn’t notice I was still doing it. I started dropping them soon after.

Now a new problem crops up – often the speaker-attribution isn’t simply the word “said”. Sometimes it’s more descriptive. Do I still drop it when the word is “shouted”? Obviously physical actions should be kept in – things like narrowing of eyes. But what about when the voice is described as “carrying an edge”? Even if we were professional actors (and we aren’t), the sound of a tight, angry voice is not the same as hearing the words “carrying an edge.” What to do when the voice-description doesn’t match the line as delivered (say, the voice is described as wavering and wild, but the line is delivered without enough waver to be noticeable? Like I said, we’re not professionals here, just amateurs doing our best). Should I leave in the description and cause dissonance in the audience, or do I drop it and lose some of the tone and some of the author’s intent?

The problem with learning as you go, rather than being taught by someone, is you don’t have answers for this sort of thing. I try to strike a balance, hope the author isn’t maltreated and the audience isn’t irritated, ask my ancestors for forgiveness, and forge on.

(edit: holy crap, Eliezer reads these notes!)

Interrupting is difficult. I imagine it’s always difficult, even when everyone is gathered together in a room or on a stage, because when you’re putting on a show you all have your assigned lines and it’s natural to take turns saying them. It’s hard to leave the “You go, now I go” dance and move into listening for the sentence to come close to the interrupt point and start speaking while the other person is still talking. It’s not made any easier when the lines are delivered remotely and there’s no one else around to actually interrupt. In editing I’ve erred on the side of making sure every word is intelligible (as it is when you read them) and never had any voices overlap. I sometimes wonder if that was the right decision.

Interrupting is also a marker of status, and a sign of politeness. McGonagall is very proper and rarely interrupts anyone. Severus is abrasive and interrupts all the time. Most other characters follow social norms and freely interrupt those below them, occasionally interrupt their peers, and almost never interrupt a superior. It’s interesting to note that Harry Potter will freely interrupt anyone he’s talking to when he feels he has something to add. I asked a friend who didn’t like the fanfic what turned her off, and she said it was the way Harry showed disrespect to McGonagall. I was a bit surprised, because I didn’t feel he had (at least not egregiously). But I had been reading under the assumption that Harry was a person, and so him treating McGonagall as a peer didn’t shock me. My conversational partner was a parent, and viewed Harry as a child, and for him to interrupt her or question her was too great a violation.