 A hoi hoi, and welcome to another You're Wrong About video. Today, we're going to talk about something. I was having this discussion on my Discord for the channel, which you can find a link to in the description. But I was having a discussion yesterday night about the green light process on the SCP Wiki and how people often make a mistake. And I've said this in previous videos before, but I've never dedicated a whole video to this. But people make a mistake of thinking they have to follow the green light process in order to post the SCP Wiki. And that's simply just not true. So let's talk for just a moment about how you're wrong about getting critique for the SCP Wiki. So the impetus behind this was the major mistake. I get this a lot from new writers because a lot of new writers show up on my Discord trying to learn a little bit about the writing process. Because a lot of my older videos are about writing advice. And one thing that comes up a lot is how do I get through the green light process? How do I post the Wiki if I can't get through the green light process? And part of that is keyed into the fact that the SCP Wiki itself sort of tricks you a little bit into thinking that the green light process is necessary in order for you to post to the Wiki. It's simply their current recommendation. And honestly, I don't think it's something that they should be recommending at all. Not to say that the SCP Wiki's forum critique process isn't good, but it has a particular purpose. I like to think of it as your last ditch sort of option. You absolutely can't get good critique anywhere else. Go there and then you may be able to get some. But the problem I have with that, of course, is that you're unlikely to get much follow-up critique. Generally in my history, historically, and I've looked at it and recently even that kind of moved away from the idea that every post deserves a response, which is good because the volume is going to continue to increase to the point where things are gonna get crazy. But that also means that you may just not get a response or gets a response that's unhelpful to you understanding what's going on. Like someone might say you got your ideas unfocused and as someone who hasn't done any of this before, you listen to that and be like, what does that mean? And an unfocused idea, just because I don't wanna pass by that particular critique, because it's an often used critique, especially for the ideas that lead off of the green light process, is just the idea that, you know, you've got too many things going on at once in an idea. An idea for an SCP should really be crystallized and focused on one thing, right? Do one thing really well, because you're dealing with not even short story here. Short story is already gonna limit your focus a lot. You know, a novel, you're writing a novel. You could have three or four different plot threads going at the same time, four might be a few too many, but a few too many, one too many. But you could have that many going depending on how good of a writer you are and keep juggling those concepts. But in a short story, you really only have room for maybe one or two, usually one with like a small subplot that ties into the primary plot. While in flash fiction, which is what most, if not all, actually probably I'd say most, there are a few short story length articles on the SCP Wiki. But since what you're writing is likely going to be flash fiction, right? 1500 words or less, probably. You really only have time to develop and focus on one thing. And that's important for SCP articles for you to understand. So, once one says your ideas are unfocused, that's what that means. Now, that is just a basic sort of thing, but you also have to learn how to pitch your ideas. And for the SCP Wiki, I always suggest to people, pitch your idea in one sentence with no more than one comma. And people will be like, oh, I'll use semicolons to dozen semicolons to make a joke about it. But if you do that, you're just, you're wasting your own time. I actually had someone do something similar to that before, like legitimately did not understand that what I meant was a simplified sentence, not an overly complex sentence. They may wrote a paragraph worth of information with only one period and one comma. So, yeah, it was a whole thing. You run into people like that. But when you're looking for critique and you're building your articles up, the first thing I always suggest to people is to seek out the community of writers that you can interact with and get your feedback that way. Because ultimately, it's not just about getting approval because you're never gonna write anything and it's gonna be perfect. You're never gonna write anything, get some feedback, fix it, and then it'll be perfect. You need follow-up feedback. In order to do that, you have to talk to people who are familiar with your work. Now, I will say this, as someone who provides critique services on his Patreon, the thing about going over something like a dozen times is eventually you kinda run out of things you can say about it, even if it's not good enough. You can very well run out of things to say about it that are useful critique. And anytime anyone tells you, there's three really, really bad feedbacks, right? And I don't mean in the sense that someone tells you and you realize that your piece sucks. What I'm saying is that the ability to give feedback on an article is itself a skill. And there's three things that people say. I think they think that what they're saying is deep or intelligent and they just say it and they go like, well, no, I figured that out. One, especially for the SCB Wiki, is I think you could stand to redact more or create more mystery, which is silly. I was having this discussion last night too, something along the lines of, oh, thank you, I was looking for an excuse not to tell a story. And two, write more. When they look at something and go, this experiment log needs to be longer. And that's all they say. Like if someone gives you a suggestion on what you should develop, that's one thing. Although I will always suggest that lengthening something is never your best bet. Sometimes it's best to look at things and then to shorten them as you go along. But on the off chance that that's not an option. Like you have a piece that just doesn't work and it's missing something, you have to add something. Get specifics. And if the person won't get, won't or can't give you specifics, they're doing a bad job of giving you feedback. The third piece of feedback that you're gonna get that is actively harmful to you is it's pretty good. And that is probably not what a lot of people wanna hear. No, no, I should say that that is bad is not what a lot of people wanna hear because at least half of the people out there seeking feedback are actually just seeking approval. So when someone says, that's pretty good, they feel so good about it. They're like, oh my God, I did it. Except no, that's terrible, terrible feed. First of all, your piece isn't perfect. There are things wrong with it. If the only thing someone can say about it is, it's pretty good, they're not helpful to you, okay? Just straight up. And if your anxiety is so bad that you don't feel like posting it until you get a bunch of just straight up approvals with no additional information, then maybe this isn't the business for you. What you're gonna deal with when it comes to writing for the SCP Wiki or just writing in general is you'll start to recognize what good feedback is. First of all, but second of all, understand that you aren't owed feedback just because you're on the SCP Wiki. The form critique team treats, previously and still somewhat, treats it like they have a obligation to critique your works. At least give you one post, right? You aren't owed anything. If you can't write something like engaging to start with and make the effort, nobody else is gonna write it for you. These people who go, I've got this great idea. I'm gonna give it to someone else and they're gonna make it into something good. It feels like they're doing something good for somebody else. Like any writer of any ability has ideas. Ideas are not valuable. Your idea means nothing. Anyway, point is, a lot of new writers will come along and they'll expect other people to do things for them, right? It's all about you. Writing is a very personal experience. It's most of it's up here. Most of it's not actually writing on the, or I'm sorry, writing on the page. It's not typing, it's not writing. Most of it's here. You have to think about your idea. You have to develop your idea and then you have to write it, like actually write it. But at least half, if not, I'd say for me, 80% of it is all in my head. Like it's just work, get your idea, something that excites you, something that makes you inspired and then think about how to make it work. And then you write it and then you put it out there to a group of people that hopefully you know already and that you go back and forth with feedback on, which is perfectly reasonable. Remember, nobody owes you shit. They don't owe you feedback. So if they go, I'd like you to do this for me whilst I feedback your thing, do it! Not just for this article that you're writing, but for future articles you might be writing. Think about it. If you can build a group of people, like three or four even, that you trust that are decent writers themselves maybe, but they don't have to be, sometimes you can get good critique from people who aren't great writers, but you've got people who can do the job for you. You want to continue to have that exchange. So critique their stuff, become good at that, help them where you can. And if you can't give them good critique back, which is a thing just because you can become, they're great authors on the SCP Wiki who are terrible at critique. And we make this assumption that just because they're authors, they're somehow good at it, but they're not. But here's, that's the important part, right? Make that exchange. Understand that it's transactional and there's nothing wrong with that. Even if they're friends of yours and build them up as friends so that you can feel comfortable going to them with stuff. And everyone's going to be like, I know I haven't, you haven't asked me to do anything for a while, but I need you to look at this too. Build a group of friends that are good at giving critique and just exchange critique back and forth. You will all become better writers. You will all, and everyone's different. Some people don't match up, some good critiquers like this guy over here and this guy over here are great critiquers, but when they come together, like their styles clash so much that they don't work together well. Make sure that you keep that in mind. If you want to write for the SCP Wiki, you have to have a collection of people who work with your ideas, like your style and can make your stuff better. And don't forget the most important part of that. The other, I should say, maybe not the most important half of that, the important half of that is that you get better. But like 49% of it is making sure all of them get better as well, right? Because, you know, we're selfish people naturally, but make sure they get better too. Make sure that there's an equitable distribution of critique, you know what I mean? Anyway, that's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you want to see more videos like this, please hit the subscribe button. And if you like writing advice stuff, leave a comment down below. I've kind of stopped doing them for a while, but I don't know, this was something I was having a discussion about. When you have a discussion in your Discord, which is devoted to a channel where about half your videos are, you're wrong about X and the discussion turns to how people are wrong about X. It kind of becomes the inspiration for a video the next day. But yeah, so I decided to do a writing advice video today. Suck it. Anyway, but yeah, hit the subscribe, suck it, and then subscribe. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the notification bell next to that. If you don't hit the notification bell, a lot of times YouTube won't alert you when I upload new videos, so be sure to hit this notification bell. Then, head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian, like everybody here on the screen already has, including, and let's take a look at these pledges here, lawful evil at $60 a month, hot-headed Canadian at $50 a month. Probably a wizard and definitely not a scientist at $42 a month. I see you, VV at $40 a month. Thank you very much for pledging. If you pledge more than $40, I read your name out on the channel at the end of the videos. And frankly, it's nice to know that I'm not alone out here. I'll see you all again on Tuesday.