Director’s Notes: Episode 255 - The John Peters Imaginary Corn Maze Experience

In one of my early story meetings with Joseph and Jeffrey, they asked if I had any ideas for upcoming episodes. I didn’t come to the meeting prepared to pitch anything but luckily I had an open document of random Night Vale related notes I’ve jotted down over the years and my eyes landed on the phrase “John Peters imaginary corn maze”. I do not remember writing this down at all. But I went ahead and said it out loud and now, here we are! And it ended up being one of my favorite episodes to write, in terms of the joy-to-typing ratio (or however we measure enjoyment of the writing process).

As a pacific northwesterner, I love corn mazes. But they’re never as challenging as I want them to be. They’re not challenging at all! They’re very, very easy. So my first thought was, this maze has to be difficult—as in, maybe you won’t make it out.  

As someone who’s written choose-your-own-adventure stories in the past for a mobile gaming company (and for a certain RPG tabletop game that goes live on crowdfunding today), I also love writing “branching narratives”, where a choice is offered to the player and the writer then has to go down all these rabbit holes of what different directions the story could take based on any given choice. The first rule I was taught about writing for this format was: the choices should never have a clear right and wrong answer—they should all pose equally interesting potential hazards and outcomes. Since a corn maze (any maze) is a place of choices, I thought: how can I introduce a branching narrative element into a podcast, where there is no hope of interactivity? And then, to make myself laugh, I thought: I could give choices where one of them is obviously wrong and terrible—and then make the listener choose that one, every time. We’re all allowed to be a little evil in the Spooky Season, as long as it makes us laugh.

On a side note, I love Mark Gagliardi’s work and worked with him once before (many years ago) on another podcast episode for the show Getting On with James Urbaniak, where Mark played a nefarious Old West railroad magnate. Writing with his voice in mind was also bringing me a lot of joy—but nothing prepared me for the goods he delivered here. And it also cannot go unmentioned that Jon’s work in this episode is just spooky chef’s kiss, one of my very favorite scores of his.

So I really hope you have as much fun with this one as we all did. And remember to make good choices! Ha. Ha. Ha.

-Brie Williams

October 1, 2024

Me at a post-season abandoned corn maze, 2016

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