Director's Notes: 171 - Go to the Mirror? (Patreon)

(as always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Is it possible to write an entire Night Vale episode, using only questions? Is it possible to write Director's Notes for that episode using the same device? 

Yes and yes. Although, we're only going to attempt the former. 

I like putting restrictions on my writing. It helps me navigate. It gives me a puzzle to solve, a game to play. I have to navigate narrative, a story I want to tell, but I need to keep it within this well-defined set of rules. But also those very rules start to reveal new paths for you to follow, elements you might not have thought of if you had not given yourself those limitations.

I learned a lot about questions while writing the draft of this episode. First off, when questions are piled one after the other for an entire paragraph, it creates a rhetorical feel. Nothing being asked needs to be answered. It's just posited for the listeners to think about. 

And if you continue that practice for another paragraph or two, that device starts to feel oppressive. I got stuck about 200 words in, wondering how on earth I could pull myself into the story itself. I kept staring at what I wrote not knowing how I could continue this without it stifling the plot or the mood. 

But as I kept writing, holding true to the directive of "only questions" I realized the true device of this episode is second person point of view. Cecil is speaking to you, yes, and it is also a story about his life. But the rhetorical questions ultimately place the listener in his place. It becomes about them.

And because it is Cecil asking the questions, I realized he can hide all kinds of information. He can imply things that we can't quite know. It's second person point of view, but the narrator is tightly controlling exactly what the listener can see or know. And this is a great ingredient in horror. 

It's like in a tv show or film when someone is driving, and the camera is focused only on the driver but not the road. It never shows you what is in front of the vehicle, and it's scary because at any point, the filmmakers can cause a deadly and shocking wreck. They usually don't, but we know that they could. 

That's what I wanted to play with here, was a sense that you get to ride in the car with Cecil and be with him as he stands in front of the mirror. And I even wanted you to experience some of those things too, but I also want to keep you from seeing everything he can see or knowing everything that he knows. 

I'm excited to explore more of Cecil's past (this episode is a sibling of episode 33 - Cassette). And mostly, I have to remind myself regularly that writing horror is fun and challenging.  I hope this writing experiment is as fun for you to listen to as it was for us to make. (shout out to the amazing work Cecil did with his performance and the super spooky audio editing from Disparition.)

-Jeffrey Cranor
August 1, 2020