Escape-Room Writing: A Story People Have to Act On

An escape-room audience does something a novelist cannot require of a reader: it moves around, talks over itself, misses things and decides what to touch. The story has to survive that behavior. Ideally, the behavior becomes part of the pleasure.

This project concerned escape-room writing. Its operator and unreleased material stay out of this account. What interests me is the difference between a story people follow and an experience in which they have to decide what happens next.

Give the action a reason

A room can contain an ingenious sequence of puzzles and still leave people unsure why they are solving them. Narrative gives the activity a reason. Who needs help? Why does the situation matter? What changes if the group succeeds?

Those questions influence the opening, the language of clues and the way the experience handles progress. They also affect how much explanation an audience can absorb before it wants to begin. The opening needs to create interest while leaving room for discovery.

Write for a distracted audience

Participants do not encounter every sentence in the order a writer imagines. Some notice a detail immediately. Others are still thinking about the previous problem. A useful script allows for that difference without repeatedly stopping the experience to explain itself.

The same consideration extends to marketing. A prospective guest needs a sense of the world and the kind of experience on offer. Giving away the mechanism would spoil the very thing the copy is trying to sell.

I like this assignment because it makes the writer think about attention as something physical. Where people are, what they are doing and what they believe is happening all influence whether a sentence works.