Director’s Notes: Episode 269 - A Story About Me

Episode 13 (“A story about you.”) set up a few things in Night Vale lore. First, we’ve got the Labyrinth, though we didn’t name them that until we wrote the Night Vale novel The Faceless Old Woman. We also set up the “dark planet lit by no sun…” phrase, which of course means death. And we also set up the recurring structure of “A story about…”

This last thing is my favorite. I love a recurring structure! (Put that on a T-Shirt.) Partially because it’s always simpler to follow a template. Maybe not easier, because of the template’s restrictions. But certainly simpler for my brain to comprehend.

More importantly, the “A story about…” formula allows us to tell a single narrative of a character. In the case of episode 13, that character was you. But the last couple of these episodes I wrote were “A Story About Him,” wherein Cecil’s sister Abby talked about their father. We’d only ever talked about that man from Cecil’s point of view, but “A Story About Him” allowed me to get out of Cecil’s head and explore a different opinion about Father-worship and patriarchal attachments.

And with this episode, “A Story About Me” gave me the chance to let Steve have a whole episode to himself, to narrate his day at work with Labyrinth. The character of Steve Carlsberg is so fun to write for because (1) Hal Lublin is an incredible performer, and (2) just like with Cecil’s father, the arc of Steve is learning about him through more than just Cecil’s vantage point. Writing Steve Carlsberg is writing humanity. It’s learning to understand people however kind or irritating they may be to some.

Plus, I did my best to mirror the original “A story about you.” episode from our first year of writing this show. It’s not a perfect mirror of that episode, but I hope the connections are visible.

Jeffrey Cranor
June 1, 2025

Listen here.

Want the illustration as a print? Buy it here.