Joseph Fink Credits Grim Fandango With Shaping His Storytelling

How Grim Fandango Shaped Joseph Fink’s Storytelling

The cocreator and cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale—arguably the most important fiction podcast ever—revealed that the 1999 adventure game Grim Fandango fundamentally formed his grasp of narrative structure. Fink described it as an adventure game about a sad sack grim reaper navigating a film noir afterlife. According to the writer, lines and visuals from the title remain permanently etched in his memory, even though many of them were parodies or references to classic films he did not even recognize when he first played it.

That early foundation translated into a prolific career spanning cosmic horror and serialized audio drama. In addition to co-writing the three Welcome to Night Vale novels, he has also penned the Alice Isn’t Dead novel and The Halloween Moon. His catalog includes Alice Isn’t Dead, which takes some of the conspiratorial cosmic horror of Night Vale and turns it into fodder for a more serious series about relationships, trauma, and the open road, as well as a sequel series out now called Don’t Tell Alice that takes the story down an even darker path in which protagonist Keisha is the one with a secret. His latest project is a brief and unsettling novella titled The Nudge, which features gorgeous illustrations from Jessica Hayworth (who also provides the art for Night Vale) and hits shelves on September 1st.

The Rise and Fall of Audible’s Unlicensed

Among his extensive catalog of audio fiction, Fink singles out one project that fulfilled his exact creative vision. Unlicensed was designed as a mystery series set in the least cool parts of Los Angeles, the parts where the actual people live. Avoiding the trap of making something that was simply passable for non-mystery writers, the team aimed to write a damn good mystery.

good for two writers who usually don’t write mysteries.

Joseph Fink, via The Verge

The production secured three seasons out of Audible before the company mostly shut down its original shows department, and that was it. Fink noted that if he had his choice, he would happily spend the rest of his life writing Unlicensed.

Practical Wisdom on Creativity and Digital Life

He recently watched a talk with Meshell Ndegeocello, where she described having to shush a fellow student in a guitar workshop who was noodling on his guitar while the teacher was trying to demonstrate something.

As a musician, it doesn’t matter how well you play if you can’t listen.

Meshell Ndegeocello, via The Verge

Fink noted he does not know if it is the best advice he has ever received, but thinks it is damn good advice and applies to a lot of things outside of music. Outside of writing, his daily digital habits remain remarkably specific. He relies on Podcast Addict—an Android-only podcast app made by one guy named Xavier—describing it as so much better than any other podcast app that it’s the main reason he can never switch to an iPhone, joking that he is maybe the one guy in the entire country who chooses phones based on how they play podcasts. For social media, he uses Bluesky, which he used to like because no one was there and so no one read his posts, which is really the ideal social media for him, though now that more people are there and sometimes read and respond to his posts, it is a drag. He is very much a text guy, which is why he sticks to text social media mostly, even though that doesn’t really help sell books or stuff like that.