 a hoi hoi and welcome to the channel. Feeling a little rough today, so I figured I would do one off-camera with a little bit less work as well. The thing is, I've been thinking recently a little bit about how SCP drafts come across my desk on a pretty regular basis, and on my Discord server people talk about their SCP drafts on a pretty regular basis as well. And I've observed critique, and I've also observed people having trouble coming up with good critique about articles. Part of the reason for that is that a lot of people don't understand how to deal with an SCP article draft that is just bad. Now there are a lot of ways to look at this. Not every SCP article draft, let's just call it drafts, not every SCP draft is necessarily unsalvageable. An SCP draft usually has flaws. It's very rare, I don't think I've ever come across something that didn't have something that was correctable. Sometimes it's just a basic grammatical error, a couple of vaguely worded phrases or descriptions, or something along those lines. But sometimes you come across something that is so fundamentally bad. It's core level that you really are at a loss as to where to start. And I can think of a few strategies for dealing with such a thing because it has happened to me quite often. At this point, I mean I've been in the SCP community since 2014, so yeah, I've had a little bit of experience at this point with dealing with just straight up SCP drafts that are bad. First of all, understand that you are not a paid editor. What does that mean? Well, there are paid editors out there, people who will do editing work for money. You are doing your critique as a favor to somebody else. You owe them nothing. Now, that isn't to say that you shouldn't do your best if you offer to actually help someone. Should know when to cut your losses, let's put it that way. If you come across something that is just so fundamentally bad that it's going to take you all day to work through the problems, then perhaps it would be best if you moved on and just said, I give them a few things that they can fix and then move on. But secondly, sometimes you need to adjust your strategy. There are plenty of drafts where you can be like, this is what you've done wrong here. This is a structural issue that can be fixed. This is another thing that can, this is another thing that can be fixed. But at some point, you can look at a draft and say, no matter how much help I give this person, this draft is not salvageable. Sometimes, and I say this as someone who has on multiple occasions claimed that there are no such there's no such thing as a bad idea. There's just bad writers. And this is still true, but you can also get a sense of somebody's skill at writing from their draft. And if you look at an idea and you realize that this is going to take a much better writer than this to pull it off, feel comfortable telling them. So you do them no good by giving them hope that they can somehow make a difficult idea work. There's no bad ideas. There are difficult and easy ideas. Let's put it that way. Writing is a skill that requires practice. It also requires observation of other people to learn. So in a lot of cases, you'll run across drafts that are just very, for lack of a better way to put it series one. And series one isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of successful articles even in the modern day that have a very series one vibe. However, it's not the easiest way to get an SCP onto the wiki anymore. And it can be very helpful to someone to just tell them, yeah, you've read a lot of series one and series two SCPs, do me a favor, start reading series three, four and five, and I guess six now. And learn what the SCP wiki kind of expects from you in a modern article versus a classic article. And sometimes that could be the totality of your critique, not even bothering with the actual like, look, this has a very series one vibe. This is a very, this is not working. I think it would be better for you to take a break and read more SCP articles so you can become more comfortable with what an SCP article that's published today looks like. And finally, there's a couple of basic rules for SCP authors that I like to give out just for starting off. It's not necessarily something you have to hold to for forever and you should make that clear. But if people get into a habit, I've seen this a lot and I'm sure people who try to critique article see this a lot. And this is helpful to you if you're trying to write an article as well. If your SCP is a reflection of you or an author avatar of any kind that you're trying to create, or incredibly deadly, or incredibly important to the world that it's in, or the scope is far, far too wide for a piece of flash fiction, narrow the scope, don't try to create an author avatar on your first try on the SCP wiki, and don't try to create like an original character. Let's put that way. And don't make it deadly. These are very basic things you can do to create an interesting article that doesn't feel like you're trying to do too much too early. And I say that because the SCP wiki is still a bit of an elite playground to play in. You're going to have to be rated by other SCP authors. This is just the way it is. And SCP authors have a concept in their mind of what a new be author is rather than just a new author and newbie authors tend to do those things. They tend to create something that's incredibly deadly for no reason or indestructible for no reason. That's another thing. Or they try to create an author avatar off the bat, Dr. Researcher James, who is from Kentucky because the writer is from Kentucky and try to create this that is infected by an SCP. But don't worry, they're still allowed to roam the site and work as an SCP doctor because that's what they want their character to be able to do. But that's all they're doing. They're just creating a character with no nothing attached to them. It's not even a matter of who they are, what they want, and where they're from. It's a matter of only what can they do. And that is a serious mistake when it comes to creating any sort of SCP fiction. I think beyond just some basic rules for your first article, which don't always apply for going forward, once you become more established on the SCP wiki, creating a character is not just not just reasonable, it's also sort of a natural progression for people. But when but only once you've proven that you can write an SCP in an interesting way. And plus writing an SCP without it being based around a specific character often associated with the author is useful for you because you learn what an SCP article needs to look like outside of what this weird conception in your head is. And finally, just as I mentioned earlier, when you tell people that they need to read more modern articles, it's fine to look at a draft and say, this would be more work to fix than to just start on something new. It's very rare that that's often that that's true. But it is sometimes true. Sometimes it is best for them to just scrap what they're writing on and start over from scratch. This is true of some like established authors as well. It's just the truth. But learn to recognize these. This isn't then it shouldn't be something that you're suggesting to people all the time, but it is something that you should keep in the back of your head. Look at an article, evaluate it realistically, understand what it is. And by the way, these are good skills for you to have for yourself as well. Anyway, that's it. Thank you very much for watching and listening. As I said, I'm feeling a little bit under the weather, but I think I'll be all right by Thursday. Just a little rough. I don't think I got enough sleep last night. I look terrible. But I would like you to hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian and pledged any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Sinjeriki, who is pledged at $100. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Thursday.