Welcome to Night Vale - Behind the Scenes Questions 1

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

(UNLOCKED: originally posted to Patreon Jan 30, 2020) Joseph and Jeffrey answer your questions about podcast crossovers, three part stories, and how to balance work and creative endeavors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Jeffrey Craneer. Happy summertime from Nightvale. As we take our usual July off, we wanted to still give you some good, good Nightvale things to listen to. This is an unlocked Q&A, Joseph Fink, and I did for the Welcome to Nightvale Patreon. We do quarterly exclusive episodes for our Patreon. Half of those are bonus episodes like scripted, and the other half are behind the scenes looks into how we make Nightvale, like this episode to follow. We've been making Nightville for 14 years, and it's our supporters through Patreon that have kept this show of float. They get director's notes for every episode, early ticket buying opportunities for live shows, and twice monthly essays for me and Joseph. We also have ad-free podcast feeds and monthly Zoom hangouts and even a book club. So check out patreon.com slash welcome to Nightvale to become a Patreon member for great original Nightvale things like this episode. That's patreon.com slash welcome to Nightvale. And hey, thanks. Hi everyone. Welcome to one of our bonus episodes. Just for you, our Patreon Scouts. Thank you so much. We genuinely could not make the show without you. It is the reason we are able to make the show independently and make the kind of weird show that you can't make in a lot of other forms of media. For this bonus episode, we asked you to send some of your behind-the-scenes questions for us. Just stuff you wanted to know. about how we make the show, and we are going to answer some of them for you now. Jeffrey,

do you want to start us off with the first of those questions? I probably should have introduced myself at the top of this. Hi, this is Joseph Fink here with Jeffrey Greiner. Thanks, Joseph. Yeah, let's do this. So, Kristen Bamba asks, I was wondering, in regards to the background music and sound effects, when are those created and added after Cecil records the script, or is Cecil aware of the music and sound effects beforehand. Like the example that Kristen gives is the static when station management is on the air, or a phone is ringing, or the building is shaking, etc. We write those sound effects into the script.

So if we're going to use a sound effect, it goes into the script as a stage direction. So oftentimes Cecil never hears the sound effect until we have fully produced the episode. John Bernstein produces the episodes now, but, uh, Joseph, you used to do all the mixing and editing. Yeah, and the creation of those, generally speaking, are oftentimes really, really low budget, right? Like, we pull them from freesound.org and maybe just do a crappy effect on them in audacity. And some of them, I think...

Now that John produces, I think he just goes ahead and makes some of those himself. Oh, yeah, yeah, the quality of sound effects has gone up since John has taken that over. Thank you so much for your question. Kristen. The next asker is Buttercup. She asks how much of the overall plot was planned in the beginning and how much of it was made to fit with things that had already been done. Very little to none of the plot existed. If you mean beginning as in the first episode, I mean the first episode was me writing these paragraphs that all seem to take place in the same town, but without really knowing what they were, if you listen to the pilot with that in mind,

you can kind of hear it. There's not like a much of a story to the pilot. It's more just, here's a lot of vignettes from this strange place, just trying to figure out what it is. And I didn't know anything about that place or where it was going. We do occasionally sit down and make some plans, and sometimes the way things work out, those plans are made long before. You know, there's stuff that's happened that we definitely sat down two or three years before it happened, and we're like, someday it should end up like this. And then it just ends up taking two or three years before we get the story there. But most of what we do is kind of backwards continuity of looking at what we've written and trying to find new and interesting stories to tell with that.

Just being like, hey, you know, I noticed I introduced this thing in episode three or whatever and we never addressed it. I think it would be really interesting to bring that back and tell a story with it. And so that's how a lot of that is built. Awesome. So let's go to Mark Dwyer who says, I love Welcome to Nightville so much. It has led me to some of your other podcasts. Alice Isn't Dead. and within the wires, do you ever consider crossover storylines that include your other creations?

Some of them seem tailor made for a visit to or from Nightvale. With the example of those two podcasts, no. They just sort of exist in their own worlds, and I think it would limit the growth of, you know, Nightveil or within the wires to shows that are still ongoing and being created to tie them together in a certain way. obviously having done a crossover show with a thrilling adventure hour before we're not opposed to it it's not that it's just I think they just feel like separate creative

endeavors for us to make on our own Alice that you make Joseph and within the wires that I make with Janina that yeah to try and cross those over with Nightville would be a little tougher with each other but yeah we actually have been talking about doing some other variations on crossing over Nightville with other

things that exist in the world and we'll have more on that soon. But it's always a fun exercise to do, but not with stuff that's currently in the Nightbelt Presents Network. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to speak for you for Within the Wires, but for me, part of the appeal and what interested me about Alice isn't dead was getting to play in a different world, getting to tell a story. And a lot of it is tone difference, you know, Nightville. Everything's a little absurd and funny and kind of dark play funny. And with Alice Isn't Dead, I really wanted to play in a world of like, what if the scary things were just scary and there was nothing funny about them. And so, yeah, to me, as the writer, what appealed to me is that it felt like a different world. And so that's why I think, for me,

I don't have a lot of interest in crossing those over. Ransom Duel asks, how do you come up with focuses for the three-part stories? So yeah, in the last few years, we've started to do kind of longer stories. This was partly a response to, you know, it was just hitting a point where we had so many episodes that we were hearing people be like, I don't know where to start. And it just seems like a lot of story to catch up on. Do I start at the beginning? And we don't really want to be the kind of show where you have to start from the beginning. Certainly if you want to, you can and we reference stuff and build stuff. But it is sort of the ongoing life of this community. And so we thought about, well, what if we did stories where it was clear where you needed to

start from? Where, okay, this is a three-part story. So just as long as you're starting at the beginning of the three parts, you'll get it. You know, it'll be a complete story within a own. And it was also just interesting to tell longer stories than we could tell in 2000 to 3,000 words. As for how do I come coming up with focuses, it's just trying to find stories that are bigger than you can tell. Generally, I'll try to go in with like, okay, part one, often it's like a one sentence thing. It's like, okay, part one does this, part two does this, and part three does this. And then I'll start figuring out the details from there. But If I can't figure out what is the major thing that happens in each part, then there's probably not enough story there to justify multiple parts.

And some of it is just challenging ourselves because we find it interesting. I wrote a three-part series that was based around, yeah, a heist story at the last bank of Knightville. And I know that you had an idea in your head of, can I bring, you did like the random character generator sort of thing or like random number generator to find from the list of characters that we hadn't used in a long time. Yeah, so that was, this was when we were doing the script books. So we were going back through a lot of old scripts. And I just started making a list for myself of people or things we hadn't talked about in a while that I wanted to go back to. And then I used that list. And I just used a random number generator to pick four, which was, it was Nazar al-Muzahid.

Francis. Francis, what was your last? Donaldson. The Brownstone Spire and Barks-on-Wee, the Shire. the Sheriff's Secret Police mascot. My favorite name. Those were four just randomly chosen, and I gave myself the challenge of,

I need to write a story that incorporates all four of these characters equally. That all four of these characters are important to the story. And it ended up being one of my favorite things I've ever written for Nightfail. But it just started with that game of, like, is there a way I can tell a story that somehow equally features these four randomly chosen?

and characters. What was the name of that series of episodes? It was called a story of love and horror. That's right. Because that's what it turned out to be. A story of love and horror. Danica asks, How do you design new characters and keep track of the lives of your existing ones?

Designing new characters is easier than keeping track of them. It's, you know, the design of a new character really is just inserting a name into the world and a person who, if you're going to introduce a character and, any scene, that character surely has some reason for being there. They either created the scene or they are responding to the scene or they're doing something. And with an ongoing serial like Nightvale of, you know, whatever, 100 hours of however many, however much time we've put into it, there's a lot of characters that just kind of pop up in a paragraph and then disappear forever. But then some of them, you, as Joseph was just saying about these characters for a story of love

in horror. Some of them, you just think, well, let's check back in on them. Like, what would Francis Donaldson be up to? What would Nazir al-Mujaid be up to? And let's play around with how they're doing. And as you write those characters, you know, we have to search back through all of our old scripts and see where we've mentioned them before. And there's always that balance of, in keeping track of the lives of those characters. You do have to reread and re-listen to your old stories to how was the name pronounced? What was it? Where did we last leave them? What is their status in life?

How old are they? Things like that. Yeah, how old are they? Definitely has been tricky with, especially with some of the younger characters of just like, is to make it even still in high school anymore? How old is shit? I regularly have to do that check of like, wait, how old is this person? Which?

Are they in high school? Are they in college? The waterfall episode centered around Josh Creighton, we did earlier this year. It was just shocked to me of like, Josh is already in college. Well, so the guest writer. Brie Williams that wrote that. She wrote that as him in high school. And I was like, what, do he still be in high school? And I checked and he was like 20. And I'm like, oh, no. So I went back to her. And I was like, I love this, but he can't be in high school. Can you rewrite it as him in

college? It was so great. It's so perfect. Hi, everyone. It's Joseph Fink, co-writer of Welcome to Niveville, and writer of Alice Isn't Dead. And today I'm here to talk about Woe Be Gone, a twisting, turning weekly horror science fiction podcast. Woe Be Gone follows Mike Walters, who discovers a mysterious and violent online game. What begins as an exploration of this alternate reality game with real-life consequences quickly becomes a search for the technology that makes it possible. Woe Begone is an exploration of the nature of power, the limitations of linear time, and what it means to be an individual. Each episode has a unique soundtrack composed by the talented creator and writer Dylan Griggs. Listen to Woe Be Gone, spelled

woe period be gone wherever you listen to podcasts or check out woebegonepod.com for episodes and transcripts. Have fun and enjoy the episode. So Lauren Triola asks, when you first started writing Welcome to Nightfail, how did you balance working on the podcast with other jobs or work commitments you had? As someone with a full-time job trying to become a writer, I'd love to know how people can pursue creative endeavors that don't or don't yet make money while still being able to pay the bills. It's a really tough question. I mean, the answer is, unfortunately, you don't end up with a lot of free time, especially. You know, when Nightville happened, I was actually, I was working a part-time sales job.

So I did have some time to work on it. A lot of that was because I was making like less than $20,000 a year. And I was able to do that partly because I was living with my girlfriend who was making slightly more than that, but still not a lot more. You know, a lot of it, yeah, but even before that, when I, I had a full-time job, I would do a lot of getting up very early and writing before work. And it's hard and it makes you feel like you don't have a lot of time off because you're working before work and you're working after work. And there's not a good answer other than,

I guess my main answer would be overthrow capitalism because that would solve a lot of the problem. I'm joking, sort of, but I think understanding that this is systemic, that it's not your fault if, for instance, you feel too tired after work to write, that that is part of it, the system you're in. And so some of that is working to address the system. Yeah, I was lucky enough when I moved to New York City in 2006 to get a job that was very strictly nine to five Monday through Friday. And it was, that helped a lot to be able to have the time on the weekends to do theater and write and all of that sort of stuff. And that's how I met Joseph. And then in 2011, when we started sort of putting together the idea of doing a podcast and doing

Nightvale. And we started writing those episodes early 2012. At that point, it was finding those nights to write that I wasn't doing theater and finding the weekends to put together the writing. And yeah, it helps working with another person too because that takes up a lot of, again, it takes up half the word count that you need to make an episode work. So having somebody else there really helps that a lot. So we have Tucker Janes who writes the successive Welcome to Nightville and the attending passion of the fandom must put a lot of pressure on you as creators to find a balance between fan expectations and your own vision. Apart from Welcome to Nightville, how has that tension impacted your respective creative processes for your other Nightville Presents Projects?

Yeah, I mean, once you know people are paying attention to you, whatever it is you're doing, it definitely changes how you receive that, right? Like if you've ever kind of been singing to yourself and thinking you were alone and then you turn around and you realize people are standing near you, that's, it's alarming. And with Nightvale, you sort of anticipate that people are going to listen. And then people did start listening. And we could see download numbers. And it wasn't until we started putting it on as a live show that you actually see the people attending. And you realize, like, these aren't my friends coming to support me at whatever improv show. They are your enemies. They're my enemies. We must fight them. This is the battle. No, but these

aren't the people I know. These are all new strangers that love what we're doing and that affects, it affects you in this like sort of ethereal, intangible kind of way where you're like, you just feel strangers' eyes on you and they're friendly eyes, but sometimes the friendliest eyes are the most intimidating eyes to have on you because they want you to succeed, but they also want to be entertained. And so, yeah, I think the first year of Nightville's Uber success as we were able to tour the world doing the show and receive a lot. You so much attention. For me, it was learning to balance that emotionally

of trying to be conscious of not letting that go to your head, to be humble about that, to know that success and attention is fleeting, and just to make sure you keep writing the show you want to write, because that's what made people like you. So write the show you want

to write, make the thing you want to make. But also knowing that there's a lot more people than your normal friends that talk to you and take in what they have to say and learn from them, too, is really been a helpful thing with this audience. Yeah, I mean, my still my, my gauge for things is just if it excites me. You know, we're working on something now where I just wrote kind of the first thing for it. And a really good sign for me was after I wrote for kind of a rough, like a draft of that

first thing, and I read back through it. It made me excited. It made me excited about the story. It made me excited about the characters and it made me want to spend more time on them. And that, that to me is the only gauge I have is, is I don't know if people like it. I don't know if it'll catch on, but I do know that it's exciting for me and I enjoy writing it. And so that kind of, if it excites me, my hope is it'll excite at least one other person. Let's do one more question because I think it's a really good one. Casimir asks, where did you find your inspiration for the tone of Welcome to Nightville and were you guys big into conspiracy theories as kids? I'll answer the second one first because that's the easiest. Yes, I don't believe them for the most part,

except the ones that are true. But I was super obsessed with like, I would get books in the library on UFO and men in black and all that stuff. I just found them fascinating. They just gave me this feeling. I mean, so I was raised religiously Jewish, and I've always really loved religious stories. I grew up on Jewish fairy tales and folk tales. And I recognized a lot of the same feeling that these are folk tales, that these are religious stories, that they are trying to explain the world through metaphor.

And so I always loved flying saucers and mysterious men appearing. And one of them is Will Smith. Yeah. So, yes, I have wanted to do something with conspiracy theories my entire life. I made a few bad attempts at it before Nightfail. Nightville was kind of when I finally figured out the right tone for it. But I've always wanted to do something to do with conspiracy theories. As for the tone, that came from a lot of different writers because a lot of it is in the

pros. Once we bring up a lot are Deb Olin Unferth, the novelist, Will Eno, the playwright. Other ones for me are Thomas Pinchin, who does these things where he builds these absurdly complex conspiracy theories that don't actually make sense. And it's more just that they represent the chaos of life that there's these committees that report to other projects that report to other, and it's all just a loop and it never goes anywhere. And I just have always, I deeply love Thomas Pinchin's writing for that. Another one I'd bring up is Zadie Smith for the way that she just kind of throws detail after detail, these flurry of words that really build.

They almost feel like a really nice run on like a musical improvisation. They have this musical flow to the way the details build up and the words build up. And that's something I'm always trying for. Yeah, I definitely love conspiracy theories. I grew up in Dallas. So the idea of the Kennedy assassination was always a big one every year. There'd be a rehashing of all the different conspiracies around that and Lee Harvey and that sort of thing. So we grew up around that and I thought that was great.

I think one inspiration I don't mention a ton, but I think it was really big for me personally is I listened to a lot of radio as a kid. And even on into college as I would drive back and forth to my university out in the middle of nowhere and sometimes late at night. you know like late Sunday night coming back home from my hometown all the way three hours back to college station and you just listen to whatever talk radio you could get and I always like talk radio over music and it just it was this real miracle of just in the darkness no one else around there's just some blinking light somewhere that is transmitting or just the tower that it's at top of not the light itself is transmitting some signal from somebody hundreds if not a thousand miles away, just sitting alone probably in some booth, hunched over a, you know, a fuzzy little black microphone quietly telling me some story. And it might just be love advice,

or it might be some political rant, or it might be sports talk, or whatever it is, or local news. I just always found that really magical. I just thought that was really neat that here's just me alone in my car. Here's somebody alone in a studio somewhere. And they're just telling me stories. And I think finding, trying to capture that in my writing, and especially for Nightbale, has been really big, too. Well, that's going to do it for this one. Thank you so much, Casimir, and to all of you who ask questions, and to all of you who donate, it really is still the main way that we are able to make show is all of you out there helping us make it. We're going to do more of these.

So, you know, keep an eye out for chances to send in your questions. And see you out there on the internet. Bye. Hi, we're Meg Bashmaner. and Joseph Fink. Of welcome to Night Vale. And on our new show, The Best Worst, we explore the Golden Age of Television.

To do that, we're watching the IMDB viewer-rated best and worst episodes of classic TV shows. The episode of Star Trek, where Beverly Crusher has sex with a ghost, the episode of The X-Files, where Scully gets attacked by a vicious housecat. And also, the really good episodes, too. What can we learn from the best and worst of great television? Like, for example, is it really a bad episode, or do people just hate women? The best worst. wherever you get your podcasts.