Creating Great Letterboxes

Clever Clues

The clue is the welcome mat for your letterbox. Your clue can suck someone in, or turn them off if it’s done poorly. Your clue should be tailored to fit your audience, and is the one part of your box you can truly make your own. Stamps can be amazing or crappy, hand-carved or store-bought, but a stamp is a stamp is a stamp. Logbooks can use lined or unlined paper, be large or small, but it’s still a logbook. Clues, however, is where your creativity can really shine like nowhere else. Clues can be coded, or disguised. They can tell a story or share a recipe. You can use it to educate or amuse.

There’s no one way to create a ‘great’ clue. The best clues are unique and entertaining. The large majority of letterbox clues tend to be very straight forward. Walk down such-and-such path, look behind the big tree on the right. Those are directions, not a clue. Boring....

There’s nothing wrong with such a clue per se, but it won’t generate much interest or talk. What are examples of some more interesting and creative clues? There’s the Shakespeare Letterbox which I had a blast hunting down due to its well-crafted clues. Der Mad Stamper is famous for his puzzling clues. The Anniversary Box has a wonderfully cute clue, while the Wildwood Box has a clue where you feel like you’re playing a role in a movie.

A disproportionate number of my clues tell stories, such as Buffalo Warrior, Camelot, and a dreadful attack by dinosaurs in Land of Long Ago. I have people put on their detective cap to solve a Murder at Gabriel Park!, and another clue calls for a few good astronauts in The Eagle Has Landed. The Graveyard and Temple of Terror have clues in verse.

Such clues have taken me hours to create. They’re a lot of work, but in the end they pay off with people enjoying themselves more. It’s a nice change from the usual style of clues that move you directly to the letterbox, and people will appreciate the efforts.

Paul in SF often makes the most beautiful clues I’ve seen, such as his Nepenthe or the Death Temple of Tlamco boxes. His Vertigo letterbox takes you on a tour of Hitchcock’s movie of the same name. Paul’s used his web skills to create unique and memorable clues, and you might consider learning some basic web design skills yourself to do something like that yourself.

Take a kid-friendly series, for instance. You don’t want clues that read “turn left at the maple tree.” Include a picture in your clue of a maple leaf so the kids will be able to identify it! Use simple words. Print at the top of your clue: “For kids ages 7-10.” Let them know the box is meant specifically for them. They’ll love you for it!

Consider your audience while writing your clue. A clue designed for young kids will be very different than a clue designed for fans of Bob Hope. A clue designed for a traveler at a rest area will be very different than a clue designed for a backpacker. And a clue designed for Star Trek fans should be very different than one intended for Nancy Drew fans.

I once carved a stamp of an empty soda can, partially crushed, that I planted in a location for no other reason than that was the only stamp I had available at the time to carve. It had absolutely nothing to do with the location, but to make it interesting, I crafted an elaborate story, starting with the ‘birth’ of the soda can in a foundry and following its journey, to explain how a discarded soda can could have arrived at that location, using the clues to explain the strange choice of a stamp in that particular location.

While there is no one right way to create a clue, there are ways to insure that your box stands out from the rest. By giving clues instead of directions, you’ve already made your box unique and unusually interesting. The degree of creativity or complexity in your clues would depend on your audience. Use your clues to sell your letterbox—not by telling people to find your box, but by sucking them in and making them want to find your letterbox. Bring an emotional content to your clue—something that makes your selected audience laugh, smile, think, or learn.

If there’s one thing you don’t want to do in a clue, it’s to make a mistake. People will curse your name for decades to come if you inadvertently send them into a bush full of poison oak or over a hundred foot cliff because you got your compass direction wrong. There are few things more frustrating than not being able to find a letterbox just to find out later it that the clue was wrong.