Director's Notes: 228 - Diplomacy

The way we write Night Vale episodes is one of us does the first draft and then passes it to the other. That other person does tweaks and then passes it back to the original writer for approval. Once the script is approved, it’s sent on to Cecil Baldwin and Disparition for recording and mixing.

Sometimes the scripts get held up between Joseph Fink and me with questions about continuity, character arcs, confusing wording, etc. But most of the time it’s a pretty quick back-and-forth. It’s one of my favorite things is to get back Joseph’s tweaks and edits from one of my episodes, because there’s almost always one or more funny jokes or a brilliant passages added.

A good example of this was in our 2014 live show “The Librarian.” I wrote the first draft of the post-weather passage for this show. And here’s what I originally wrote:

Randall wanted to know what it would be like to work as a construction contractor, an auto body mechanic, a food co-op manager, a municipal park employee, a hooded figure. There is a whole world of opportunities in America. It is a free country.

And when Joseph did a pass of this text, here’s what came back:

Randall wanted to know what it would be like to work as a construction contractor, an auto body mechanic, a food co-op manager, a municipal park employee, a hooded figure. There is a whole world of opportunities in America. It is a free country, we explain to ourselves regularly without quite knowing what we mean. [emphasis on new text]

What I wrote was at best a truism, and at worst a cliché. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either. Clichés are just throwaways, something a character might say. But when you stop to really think about the clichés in your writing, you can dig deeper into what they really mean, what they’re really saying. And in the case of Joseph’s edit, he dove deeper into “it’s a free country,” and gave Cecil’s character a richer awareness of his own words. (and me too).

In this episode, here’s the original line I wrote:

Night Vale, I beg you that while nonviolence hasn’t worked YET, it still can.

And here’s how it came out after Joseph’s pass:

Night Vale, I beg you that while nonviolence hasn’t worked YET, and in the scope of history it has worked way less often than you were taught, it still can. [emphasis on new text]

Ouch, I said aloud when I read that.

You can certainly overwork a script. Breaking down every truism or cliché with pithy side-commentary can impede flow. So I don’t want to suggest a never-ending editing process. But when you find a few moments throughout a story to adorn a verbal flourish, it makes editing so much more fun.

Jeffrey Cranor
May 15, 2023