ciroccoj | fanfic lesson of the day

One of the things I try to do whenever I'm almost done a fic is to get the 'voices' right and try to picture the character saying the lines I've written for them. Eg, Lennie Briscoe could conceivably say something like "Well, you know, there's nothing like divorce to really cement a friendship." He'd be less likely, IMHO, to say, "My heart beats in passion only for you, o fairest Jack. Because you're my snuggly-wuggly."

In order to do this, I try to have whatever source I'm using for the fanfic playing in the background for a bit, while I check for spelling and punctuation, and then go over what I've written and see if I can hear the characters speaking the dialogue as written. I often end up tweaking a little here or there - dropping some final g's, taking out or putting in flowery language, whatever.

This was no problem whatsoever for the L&O fandom; I'm a self-respecting L&O fan and thus have about twelve shelves of VCR tapes with eps from season 1-14, as well as the DVDs for seasons 1&2.

It's a little tougher for Harry Potter. For one thing, it's sometimes hard to decide whether to be faithful to the voices in the books, or in the movies. For another thing, there's only three movies. We own them all, but it's a little disconcerting to have only about 6 hours of audio to work with, after the wealth of audio in L&O. It also gets a little boring. Movies have a lot less dialogue and more scenery shots than TV shows.

And today I discovered another downside to the HP fandom; when it comes to hearing the voices, I've really only got the last movie to work with for what I'm writing. Which was all I'd been using anyway so far. The characters as I'm writing them are 38 years old; I wasn't terribly worried about getting the voices right, since people change a great deal between adolescence and adulthood, but I'd figured it would probably be more helpful to have the voices of the characters at age thirteen than age eleven.

Um, yeah. Not only is it more helpful, though a little dull; it's actually detrimental to hear the 11-year old voices. Daniel and Justin wanted to watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone tonight at dinner. I said OK and we watched about an hour. Then I put them to bed and went off to finish my fic. And discovered that it's completely disorienting, trying to figure out dialogue for two grown men, when there's high little piping eleven-year old voices in my head.

Arg. Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

::little voices still chatting away happily::

Shut up! Will you shut up!

...and somewhere a little tiny Harry-voice chirps, "Did you see her repressing me? That's just what I'm on about!"