When it comes to all-ages stories that go bump in the night, nothing compares to Welcome to Night Vale, one of the first fiction podcasts. Set in a mysterious desert community called Night Vale, each episode is usually narrated by Cecil Palmer, the host of a community radio show. The episodes center around the paranormal and supernatural activity in the town and the surrounding area, which the residents see as normal. Story lines develop slowly, with characters and plot points often re-emerging and intersecting over several episodes or even seasons. Listeners should know that the stories are more creepy and weird than scary, with doses of humor and emotion in equal measure.
Joseph Fink, co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale with Jeffrey Cranor, took the time to speak with Anton Media Group about the show, the writing process, and what comes next. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where Things Began
“Jeffrey and I did a play together in 2010, 2011 called What The Time Traveler Will Tell Us. During that process, we had a lot of writers’ meetings and talked a lot about podcasts. After that play was over, I wanted to write something else with Jeffrey. At the time, there was basically no fiction podcasting. But it just made the most sense to me because we knew how
to write. We weren’t radio personalities.
It kind of came out of there.”
The Writing Process
“So, at the moment Jeffrey (Cranor)
and I are the main people writing it. We have a few people who come in occasionally and pitch an episode, but generally Jeffrey and I will sit down a few times a year and talk about the upcoming season.
It’s a casual way to figure out some stuff. Then we go and write our episodes entirely separately and then send them to each other to edit. There’s just a lot of trusting each other, you know, we know how each other work. And so generally we’ll have, kind of vaguely, ‘here’s what needs to happen in this episode. I trust that you will come up with an interesting way to do that.’”
Some Favorite Moments
“A lot of it is just playing with the boundary of what a podcast can do, what it can be. We’ve had a lot of fun with that. I’ve done an episode that was designed to be only listened to through your right ear while you let the left ear listen to the world around you. Soon
after we switched to dynamic ad insertion, where we can record an ad it’ll automatically be added to all of our old episodes when people download it, we decided to create an episode that has three different endings that are randomly added when you download it. So you just get whatever you get. You may not know that you got a different ending than someone else until you went to talk about it. As far as I know, that’s the only time that that dynamic system and podcast
has been used creatively. So I’m pretty proud of that.
“I think probably my favorite Night Vale story is the third Night Vale novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives
In Your Home. It turned out really beautifully. I’m very proud of it.”
Inspirations And Influences
We write what seems interesting to us. Any idea I have, I can figure out a way to make it work. We don’t worry so much about making sure that it sounds exactly like it did in 2013. We’re willing to tell different kinds of stories that reflect who we are now. I try not to feel the pressure of ‘this is what the show is supposed to be, This is what people want to hear.’ We just keep making stories that we like.
“My daughter was born a couple of years ago. And so obviously, that’s changed my thinking about a lot of things. And I don’t think there’s any way to keep that out of the storytelling. We generally invite staff to say, ‘Hey, this is what the story is about for us, and this is how it relates to real life.’”
The Biggest Change
In Night Vale
There’s a writer we’ve worked with quite a bit named Bree Williams who is just absolutely brilliant. She gets our voice better than anyone we’ve ever worked with. So we’re going to be bringing her on as a co-writer moving forward. That’s something we just recently did. She’ll be helping us with long-term stories and writing a third of the episodes every year. It just made sense to us that when you find someone that good, to bring them fully on board.”
Night Vale Live
“We’re on tour right now, we’ll be on tour again in November and then again in April. This is a brand new script.
As I said, we came out of theater, so I would say our Night Vale live shows are kind of at the heart of what we do. They’ve really become an important
part of Night Vale for us. We just started touring and people have been really enjoying it. So I would encourage people to check out our schedule, and if we’re nearby, come see us. You don’t have
to be caught up with the show. We make it so that you don’t even have to know the premise of the show. You can come in completely blind and just have a
good time.”
What’s Next?
“We kind of approach Night Vale differently than other projects. I’ve
done projects that are self-contained stories. In those situations I really want to know the beginning, the middle and the end. I’ll often write the ending early on so I know where I’m going with it.
For Night Vale, to us, it isn’t a story.
It’s a world. So for us, it’s about letting that world continue to grow and
expand. So I think we’re going to keep doing that.”
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