Director's Notes – Episode 105

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

People ask about the visuals of Night Vale all of the time. What does Cecil really look like? What color is this or that character’s hair? What pattern apron were they wearing?

The answer to all of these things is: I have no idea. I’m not sitting on a trove of visual information that I’m not sharing with you. I just don’t think about stories visually. It never occurs to me to think about what Cecil the character looks like, because I’m too busy worrying about what he’s saying, and the story that he’s telling.

Even when I read a book, I tend to start skimming the moment an author starts visually describing a person. I’ll get a much better sense of them from the choices they make, and how they react to other people, than from knowing what kind of shoes they’re wearing.

But occasionally I do get a very visual idea. Mostly these visuals are landscapes or moments, rather than people.

Today’s episode is one of those visual ideas. It’s a short story I thought of about four years ago, and then never wrote. The reason I never wrote it is because for whatever reason it felt visual to me, and I’m working in an extremely ill-suited medium for visual storytelling. There’s no particular reason why this story needed visuals. The action is all easily told in words, everything is simple enough to describe. But it has less to do with what it is, and more to do with how it came to me. It came to me in images, and so that’s how I thought about it.

(Interestingly I have no idea what the Smithwicks look like. Again, my visual imagination tends not to include people. But I have very specific images for the hole in the wall, the nursery, and just the general visual tone of everything that’s happening.)

Finally I decided to just write down the story. After all, I had basically written it in my head years ago.

What am I saying with this story? What is its moral? What message am I sending?

I couldn’t tell you. I saw some images. Those images told me a story. And I passed that story on to you. Now you have those images.

As Stephen King said, writing is telepathy (On Writing, 2001).

As Stephen King also said, “If he can fart, he must be alive.” (Dreamcatcher, same year).

That second quote is less specific to this episode, but it might come in handy one day.

- Joseph Fink
April 1, 2017