Director's Notes – Episode 94

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

Are you doing all right? Good, then let’s begin.

We are always looking for new ways of telling stories both within the world we’ve created, and within the medium of podcasting. There have been arguments on the internet (surprising, I know) about whether podcasting and radio are different forms of media or just different forms of distribution. I maintain firmly that they are different in form, and it is episodes like this that are the reason.

Podcasting, because of the nature of its distribution, can make demands on the listener that radio cannot. Basically anything at all that can be released as an audio file can be a podcast, and that opens up a great deal of freedom in narrative structure.

In the past, for instance, we have released two episode simultaneously that considered the same event from two points of view. We have released episodes that featured long stretches of unrelated poetry, episodes that zoomed in on minor characters, and an episode that served as an epilogue for a book that hadn’t been released yet.

I’ve had the idea for a while for an episode that would play with both stereo and the world around the listener. It actually came along with another idea about playing with stereo that you will likely see during Part 2 of Alice Isn’t Dead in early 2017.

As usual when I have a very specific idea, it took me awhile to come up with a version of a script that worked like the idea did in my head. When an idea is nebulous, it gives me the freedom to just flow with the language. But when an idea is specific, then I need to work very hard to make it feel on the page like the ideal version of it in my head.

Eventually I just made a list of ways of using the technique of this episode to play with people  (ex. “a paragraph that asks them to parse the sounds they’re hearing by different categories” “a paragraph that asks them to vocally interact with their surroundings” etc.) and then built the episode around those activities rather than around a plot. The plot of this episode is the interaction with the listener. Someone who listens passively on speakers will have a fundamentally different experience than someone who puts on headphones and agrees to play along with the game of the episode.

Of course, a game isn’t enough to carry an episode. I wanted the concept to land somewhere thoughtful and real. By forcing people to incorporate the world around them, I wanted to explore the limits of escapism. At a certain point, fantasy can only do so much. We have to look around at where we actually are and decide if we are all right with it.

Incidentally, we have gone six episodes without a guest voice, which is I think a record since we started regularly using guest voices. That stretch of “Cecil-only” episodes will end next episode, with the introduction of a brand new and very exciting voice. See you then!

- Joseph Fink
September 15, 2016