·4 min read
Nobody meets the main character
An experience in Central Park where seven statues each describe the same visitor, and the player builds him out of the pieces. Notes on writing a story where the person it is about never appears.
There is a man in Central Park who talks to statues. He carries a notebook full of Egyptian symbols and star charts, and a potato. He is convinced that the two ancient obelisks, one in New York and one in London, are connected, and that if he can work out the right arrangement of hieroglyphs he can do something about it.
You never meet him.
That was the decision the whole experience rests on, so it is worth explaining what it buys.
Seven witnesses, no scene
Walking this one, you visit seven bronze figures, ending at the obelisk itself. Each one tells you about the same visitor, in its own voice, after he has gone. The hunting dog beside the Indian Hunter met him first, slumped and out of breath. Balto got a lecture about a pharaoh's participation trophy. Mother Goose had to sit through his opinions on nursery rhymes while he ranted at toddlers about hermeneutics.
None of them narrate the story. They each narrate a few minutes of one evening, and every one of them is a little wrong about what they saw. The dog thinks he is mad. The bears think he is high-strung. The cougar corrects his grammar and gets told to shut up.
So the character arrives in you sideways. You are not told he is obsessive, you watch him rip a page out of his notebook, fold it into an origami hat, and hand it to a squirrel. You are not told he is lonely, you notice that he keeps looking at each statue as though waiting to be argued with.
I think this is the single most useful thing about telling a story across real places. You are not building scenes. You are placing witnesses.
Why witnesses beat scenes outdoors
A scene needs control. You need the player in the right spot, facing the right way, at the right moment, with nothing else happening. Outdoors you have none of that. There is a dog barking, a delivery bike, a wedding photographer, a person sitting exactly where your dramatic beat was supposed to land.
Testimony survives all of it. A statue telling you what it saw last Tuesday does not care that you arrived from the wrong direction or stopped for coffee. It does not need the light to be right. The story already happened, and you are picking up the pieces afterwards, in whatever order the paths allow.
It also solves a problem every location-based piece runs into. Your player is standing in front of a real object that is much more interesting than anything you can add to it. A bronze dog by John Quincy Adams Ward has been standing there since 1866. If your fiction competes with that, your fiction loses. If your fiction is a story about someone who once talked to that dog, the object does the heavy lifting and your writing gets to be light.
The place has to be load-bearing
The last stop is the obelisk. It is around three and a half thousand years old and it is genuinely covered in the symbols the man has been sketching all night. It was cut for Thutmose III. Ramses II carved his own name over the top of it later. It stood in Alexandria for two thousand years before it came here.
None of that is invented, and none of it needed embellishing.
That matters because the puzzle resolves against the real thing. You are not reading a description of an inscription, you are looking at the inscription, outdoors, on a stone that has been rained on for centuries. I will not say more about how it resolves, because the whole point is the moment where the fiction and the granite turn out to be the same object.
What I will say is that this only works if you pick your ending first. I found the obelisk, read what was actually carved on it, and then wrote seven statues backwards from there. Writing forward and hoping a real place would cooperate at the end would not have worked.
The bit I would tell anyone else
The temptation with a wandering character is to let the player be him. Give them the notebook, let them discover things, make them the protagonist.
Try the other way. Let the player be the one who arrives afterwards and works out what happened from people who were not paying full attention.
It costs you nothing in a place like a park, where the objects are already standing there like a row of people who have seen everything and been asked about none of it. And it gets you something a first-person story cannot: the player does the assembling, so the character they end up with is partly theirs.
By the time you reach the obelisk you have a fairly firm opinion about whether this man is a crank or on to something. Seven statues gave you the evidence. Nobody gave you the verdict.