 We, alone amongst Earth's beasts, possess a true capacity to create. It is the single unifying thread between every human who has ever lived. Some were hunters, others were gatherers. Some were sailors and others farmers. Some soldiers and others great writers. And we are all of us storytellers. Dr. Philip Foster, Humility and Humanity Welcome to Episode 008 of The Foundation. Today, we're going to talk about the process of writing in SCP. Given the nature of this, as more of a guide, we'll be skipping some of the trappings normally associated with the podcast. There will be limited music and no readings this time around. Perhaps more than ever, the majority of this podcast will contain my own opinions and thoughts about the SCP Foundation, the SCP Wiki, and the writing process. Regardless, remember that there is only one real rule in the SCP universe. There is no canon. Part 1. For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. Coming up with ideas is a fairly simple process upon which too many writers spend far too much time. For SCP articles, it's even simpler because you already have the format for presenting your idea. A common problem for newer writers will be never getting past the ideas phase. They'll pitch the idea to others over and over and over hoping for an enthusiastic response. And if they don't get it, they go to someone else. But that's not the way to develop your ideas into writing and is mostly unnecessary. I mean, I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to pitching an idea to a room. But I'll write a piece regardless of the response it gets. The only benefit I gain is that sometimes people do get excited and talk me through some of the ideas' explorable avenues. However, once you have an idea, you must write it. Ideas are just the nuggets from which you develop stories. Until they are stories, no one can tell you how it's going to work as a story. This is going to depend heavily upon how you execute your ideas. One of the most important things to do at the ideas stage is to distill your idea down to one or two sentences. I personally suggest summarizing your idea in one sentence with at most a single comma and if you can, boil it down to one to three words. Doing so will help you with your narrative focus, which we're about to talk about, and also help you determine what kind of article your story is going to be. Part two, descriptions, emotions, narrations, and characters. Most articles are one of four types. Those are articles which describe an item or person, articles which evoke an emotional response in the reader, articles which focus on a narrative series of events, and articles which present character development. Now we're going to call those descriptive, emotive, narrative, and character-based articles. It's crucially important to realize that no article serves as just one of these, and the best articles on the site will always utilize elements from all article types. Most articles, though, will tend towards one of them at a cursory glance, so given that, what do articles of these types look like? Well, we'll start with a descriptive article. And for this, I'm going to be using my own written articles as references, since those are the ones I'm most familiar with. The article I've written which best falls into the category of descriptive is, perhaps appropriately, since I just did a reading for the channel, SCP-3313. There's very little here in the realm of narrative. The article describes an object which grants the holder reality-altering capabilities. Those capabilities are clearly outlined, and then later in the article seen in action. The trick with this particular article is not that the capabilities presented here are particularly compelling. Wish-granting items exist both on and off the wiki and droves. Instead, this article survives on the strength of its one peculiar element. It's Benjamin Franklin's penis. I should be noted that this is the type of article I am perhaps the weakest in writing, and yet I can give you the least advice on. Of the three or four articles I've written of this type, none are above plus 50 in rating. There's nothing wrong with being bad at writing a particular kind of article, as long as you can identify what you're bad at. Being bad at writing a type of article in this framework doesn't make you bad at writing, or even bad at writing SCPs. Now, for a mode of articles, I think SCP-2213 is perhaps the best example of my own works. See, SCP-2213 describes a doorway which produces mindless humanoids at a rate of about one per two minutes. So far, so boring. The documentation goes on to explain the way in which the humanoids are killed. Now, they're mindless, so any method works. But the ending describes how these are actually sentient refugees from another dimension. And this is driven home by a trick wherein the link to the next piece of documentation is framed as you're deleting all evidence of the refugees being sentient. This not only hits you with an emotional punch, but also makes you an active participant in the conspiracy. Narrative articles tend to create a story structure with a linear timeline of events, though linearity is not a requirement. The article I've written which best fits this description would be SCP-2986. This one describes a cardboard box, which from the interior appears to be a spaceship. The narrative structure tells us that there was a boy who created this place and walked you through how he and several of his friends ended up stuck inside and sailing through an imaginary version of space. It's a simple and short story, but it does inspire a sense of some mystery and features another small twist near the end. The kids eventually grow up, and the world of their imagination is no longer sufficient. Still, now we can move on to the final type of article. A character-based article. Now, I want to make this clear up front. The character you follow in an article's story structure does not have to be the SCP object itself. That is sometimes the right way to go about it, mind you. But it is not automatically the way you're supposed to handle this type of story. Perhaps my most character-focused SCP would be SCP-2913. In it, you're introduced to SCP-2913, a sapient and an invulnerable severed hand. This character has a heavy case of guilt for things his former owner did while the hand was still attached, and perhaps most of all, the hand loves watching television. The character has flaws and changes a bit throughout the article. It's one of my earlier works, but also one of my more successful, because the character in it is something that, despite being a severed hand, people can identify with. So, how does classifying your articles help you? Well, first, there's probably a type you're very good at and a type you're not. Perhaps you're good at evoking emotion in the reader, or maybe you can craft an impressive narrative in the SCP structure. It doesn't really matter. Work on what you're best at until you feel comfortable tackling different kinds of writing. And second, you want to eventually become competent at writing all four types of articles. Now, for a lot of the newest writers on the wiki, the purely descriptive article is all they're familiar with. Some of the earliest and most popular works on the wiki are, after all, essentially item and monster descriptions right out of Dungeons and Dragons. I think SCP-173 or SCP-343. Yet, the wiki moves fast, so 173 and 343 are ancient history compared to what we write now. And if they're one of the first things you've read, they're also the first things that most other people have read, and other readers are hungry for something new. Part three, pacing, presentation, and priorities. Perhaps the easiest ways to improve a middling article are to speed up the pacing, change the order or method by which the information is delivered, or resolve your narrative focus. I'll touch on these briefly, but I should be clear, these problems and solutions are interrelated. Pacing is hard to grasp fully as the writer of the work. Some people will be good at that, and others will never notice that their own piece drags because they are very excited about certain passages. But that's what pacing is. It's the speed at which the work moves through the information. If the information is delivered slowly with a lot of extraneous detail, the reader will get bored quickly and tune out. To that end, everything you include in your work should be important. This is known to writing students as the Chekhov's gun principle, and I'll quote Anton Chekhov here. Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. This is where classifying your article as a particular type can help. If your piece is supposed to evoke the emotion of sorrow, but includes several small sideline stories which are meant to scare the reader, your piece isn't enhanced by these additions. The reader will become confused by this mentally without even realizing it and turn off from your story. This goes for all other article types as well. A narrative focus means focusing on a single narrative, to the exclusion of events unrelated to the primary narrative thrust. A descriptive article needs to be simple and focus on a single object as much as possible. A character-focused article needs to remain focused on a single character. Obviously, side characters would need to exist in order to facilitate the story you're crafting, but they have to remain side characters. Furthermore, portray that character consistently. Don't inspire anger at him in the first section and then develop a sad backstory in the second half without a clear bridge between the two emotional character arcs. A quote relating to this, often misattributed and perhaps sourceless, says to kill your darlings. This is related to the above principle because often, you will be very excited about parts of your article that are unrelated to the primary focus of the piece, but delete them anyway. Maybe you can save them for a future story, but just because you're excited about a particular passage does not mean it enhances the piece for the rest of your readers. And finally, we're going to talk about something we've only briefly touched on so far, presentation. This is a simple fix most of the time, things like breaking up your paragraphs. An average size paragraph in a book will, on the wiki, appear as a big block of text. So find natural places to break those paragraphs up, because that block of text acts as a visual wall between your readers and the story you're delivering. Unconsciously, the reader will see it and feel a twinge of disappointment at having to slog through it unless your story is incredibly engaging and it probably isn't, I'm just saying. Tone is another key piece here and it's important in all writing, but it has special meaning on the wiki. It's the difference between saying he has three meaty hands and saying SCP-XXX's non-standard anatomy includes three arms. One is informal, the other sounds like what you'd see in a scientific paper. This is as much about perception as it is about accurate clinical tone, so keep your reader in mind when you use a particular phrasing and be sure to find a good balance that allows you to preserve good pacing. Now to touch briefly on black boxes, expungements and redactions, I'd say generally avoid these. A number of established authors still use these for dates and names and places, but this is not a practice I suggest emulation of, including dates and names and places can help enrich your article's backstory. Now early on in the site's history, this kind of thing helped add a sense of realism to the articles, but today they mostly serve as a distraction from the greater narrative purpose of what you're writing. A redaction says to the reader, what's being hidden here is important and it almost never is anymore. This is a case of the unfired gun from earlier. If you cover up something in an article, make it something important and make it key to the narrative. Illusion is not an element that should exist outside of your article's structure. It should be built in. I have 30 posted SCP articles as of this recording, and I'm not yet fine a good spot to use it. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a purpose. Use it only when it matters, or it won't matter at all. Also, use a sandbox page to preview your article's formatting. A fair number of the newest writers will use a Google document to start with. I use a notepad for my initial writing, but once I'm ready to start looking for feedback from others, which I'll talk about more in a moment, I need to know what the article looks like when posted on the site. That includes how the lines are spaced, bolded, italicized, blocked, and pretty much everything else. Visual presentation, including finding a good image, is perhaps the second most important part of an SCP article after the writing itself. Ignoring that can turn a good article into a bad one, and it will turn a bad article into hot garbage. Part 4. Where Your Dreams Go to Die There are several places where feedback can be sought on the SCP Wiki. First, the site's forums have an entire section devoted to writing help. The chat server the site uses has two main channels where feedback can be sought, Site 19 and the Critters, but once you get someone to read your piece and tell you what they think, what do you do with the information? You improve the piece using the feedback. I know this is an obvious answer, but I've seen writer after writer completely ignore it. The job of the person giving you feedback is to seek problems with the work that need to be corrected. If you go looking for feedback for the purposes of approval, you're doing it wrong. Critique is not a personal attack on you, and it's not an irrational hatred of your work, and even if it is, sometimes there's a nugget of truth to an irrational critique, so use it. As a new writer, you may have friends who absolutely love your work, and those are good friends. What you want is a good friend who is willing to tell you what sucks about it. In fact, my advice for new writers is never post an article until you find at least one person who hates it. This relates to the primary purpose of critique, improving your work. A person who hates the work, but can provide you with objective reasons why, is more valuable to you than a hundred friends who love it. So now that you've taken the advice on board, what do you do next? Well, if you had to fix a fair number of problems, restructured the piece, or simply had a high volume of initial feedback, go back for more critique. It's likely that your fix has created some more problems, hopefully fewer than you started with. And it's a matter of trial and error at this point, so keep going back for critique until you're satisfied with the piece. Part five. You must be joking. Here's a joke from 1000AD from Britain. What hangs in a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? The answer? A key. So examine the structure of this very old joke. It involves a basic setup and a payoff. It allows you in your head to arrive at an obvious answer before pulling the rug out from under you. This is the basis of a narrative plot twist. I think getting a plot twist as jokes helps me immensely in their execution, but it's probably more complicated than that. First, fair warning. I will be spoiling the movies The Sixth Sense and Signs here in my examination. So if you haven't seen either of those two movies, watch The Sixth Sense. The Sixth Sense involves one of the best plot twists in recent cinema, so let's talk about why it worked. In it, Bruce Willis' character acts as a psychologist to a troubled young boy who believes he can see the dead. As the movie progresses, you learn more about the boy and eventually come to the conclusion that he's not just troubled. He really can see the dead. And at the end of the movie, you learn a fundamental truth about the piece that subverts everything you've learned to that point. Bruce Willis' character is already dead. This moment has more than one name, but we're going to call it the reveal here. It's the moment where the entire story is recontextualized. The thing is, that means you're reliving the entire narrative from start to finish in a single moment. The reveal works best at the very end of a story for that reason. The entire work becomes something else entirely. In The Sixth Sense, this makes you realize that no one in the entire movie actually directly interacts with Bruce Willis' character. These key pieces of foreshadowing are easily overlooked, but it makes the entire story take on a different tone. In one scene, instead of his wife's anniversary dinner being a cold, emotionless encounter between two people who are falling out of love, it's a ghost sitting at a table with a silent woman who is trying her best to deal with her husband's passing. But plot twists work best in works that are already great. When applied to a work that is less than stellar, they can feel forced and meaningless. The same writer and director that created The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan, also created the movie Signs. We're going to examine why the twist there doesn't work. In this movie, aliens come to Earth to invade. And at the end, we learn that they're damaged by water. Even the summary feels forced, but there's very little foreshadowing in the movie that could lead to this conclusion, and the plot twist recontextualizes almost nothing important. A successful plot twist needs to resonate with one of the key pillars of the story. In The Sixth Sense, it's the central premise, seeing the dead. In your article, it could be the central premise, the reaction of the foundation to the SCP object, or a character's motivation. The more central the twist, the better it will work. But it can't be something the reader won't accept. Some twists involve leaps of logic that break the piece's narrative structure. In Signs, it's the idea that aliens would invade a world covered in 70% water with water vapor in the atmosphere. Even the water is poisonous to them. This kind of break in the logic of the piece recontextualizes the already mediocre work in a way that makes it worse. So how do you apply a plot twist to your story? Well, this is flash fiction, so rewriting your piece with a twist you didn't think of until the last second is actually pretty easy. But if you write a much longer article, you generally want to have the twist in mind as you write. A twist has to be internally consistent after all, and you want to spread information throughout the piece as either a hint towards the eventual reveal or which will be recontextualized by the reveal. So remember the structure and set up the joke. Part 7, Recommended Reading. This is by no means a complete guide. I could go on for hours and still leave out key pieces of information. You will learn by failing and trying again. Eventually, you will have a solid handle on how to write an article. But until then, here's some helpful pages from the site itself on the topic. And also, links to everything will be in the description. How to write an SCP by the Administrator. A few examples of things not to do in an SCP and what to do instead by Randomini. Essays on Style by various authors. Ideation, a guide to making good ideas out of nothing by Randomini. Rodgett's SCP Writing Walkthrough by Rodgett. Clinical Tone Declassified by a Random Day. Doing the Safety Dance by Valinix. Rules of Thumb by various authors. And Photoshopping your SCP by Famine Pulse. Credits. My name is Christopher Clayton Morris, though you may know me better under the pseudonym Dr. Sumerian. This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution, Share Like, Unported License. All works from the SCP Wiki used or referenced in this podcast are under Creative Commons 3.0, Attribution, Share Like, Unported License, including the following works. SCP-3313 by Dr. Sumerian. SCP-2213 by Dr. Sumerian. SCP-3913 by Dr. Sumerian. Starting to see a pattern here. SCP-2986 by Dr. Sumerian. SCP-173 by Modo42. SCP-343 by an unknown author. How to write an SCP by the Administrator. A few examples of things not to do in an SCP and what to do instead by random meaning. Essays on Style by various authors. Ideation. A guide to making good ideas out of nothing by random meaning. Rodgett's SCP Writing Walkthrough by Rodgett. Clinical Tone Declassified by a Random Day. Doing the Safety Dance by Valinix. Rules of Thumb by various authors. Photoshopping your SCP by Famine Pulse. This podcast contained the following audio works under a variety of licenses. A Human Being by Andy G Cohen. Off the 2016 album Through the Lens. License Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution, Unported. On We by Lee Rosevere. Off the 2017 album The Big Loop. License Creative Commons 4.0, Attribution, Unported. You're currently listening to the 49th Street Galleria by Chris Zabriski. Off the 2013 album Undercover Vampire Policeman. License Creative Commons 3.0, Attribution. Thanks for listening. Also, the quote at the start of the podcast was just something I made up. Plot twist!