 Hey there Foundation staff, Shurm here and welcome to Researchers Notes, the book club of the SCP Foundation. Each month we approach two SCPs suggested by the community and discuss their themes, stories, merits and pitfalls to get deep into the mechanics of writing an SCP. I'm going to give my thoughts and I'm also going to give you guys a chance to voice your opinions as well. For future episodes, you can request the next SCP we'll cover and or you can send me a 30-second to 2-minute audio recording of your thoughts about the upcoming skip or a written transcript that you'd like me to record on your behalf. You can get these things to me through the Site 42 Discord server, link in the description, or you can email them to scp Site42 at gmail.com. I'll be revealing the next SCP at the end of the episode. Today, we're going to be exploring SCP 3707, fly by night only, by user Communism will win. One cool thing I want to bring up about this skip even before summarizing it is that Communism wrote this skip expressly to practice for future short works contests. There's a consensus in Google search results that short stories are, for the most part, harder to write than longer ones. While novels require stamina, the margin of error is much narrower in short stories. If you write a boring or bad sentence in a novel, it's such a small fraction of the story that you can get your reader back on track. In short form stories, every word matters in getting the most meaning to your reader in the least space. There's no time for wasted sentences. SCP 3707 is under 233 words. If a 10 word sentence is bad, that's almost 5% of your story that you just blew with one sentence. Now that we've fun facted our way through that little inside the writer's mind, let's summarize this skip. SCP 3707 is a car. If you drive this car between 12 and 3 a.m., you will feel a mild compulsion to drive away from home and never look back. If you follow the compulsion for an hour, you blink out of existence. Your job, family, loved ones all move on as if nothing happened and your role in their lives is filled by another person with no fuss, no musts. From here, let's jump to an opinion from Chaltak, a contributor of the SCP Declassified Subreddit. The first series of SCP articles won because of what they left unsaid. This is an excellent example of that concept. The horror of 3707 isn't that there's a car that makes people disappear. That's spooky, but not much else. What's horrifying is how easily people disappear. Their families and the world doesn't fall apart without them. Everyone just adjusts. The gap is filled and everything just moves on as before. This article exploits the fear of meaninglessness. The idea that we don't matter and will vanish without leaving a ripple. It gives us that uneasy sensation of fear without smashing you over the head with it in only a few hundred words. That's what made so many series 1 skips great. And while I'm not going to complain that the old days were better, they weren't. This is gold that shouldn't be overlooked. Thanks, Chaltak. When you write, it's important to know why you're writing. Is there a story or concept inside you burning to get out? Is there a moral or idea that you want your audience to understand? This why can be very helpful in driving the direction of any work of art. And in this piece, the thing the audience can't stop talking about is the mood. Before I dive in, let's hear from SCP author and Site 42 discord member Bitter Mixon. It isn't often that an SCP article strikes an unusual chord. We're familiar with the sensation of fear, disgust, sadness, content. But 3707 invokes a very cold and distant feeling that I find it hard to describe. It's not dissimilar to the feeling you may get walking alone down a familiar route. It's not dissimilar to the numbing quiet of an empty glade in a freezing gale when you really feel the world wrenching itself around you. It's an uncomfortably human kind of emotion that is captured exquisitely in less than 250 words. The article also makes excellent use of the compulsion trope. Compulsion has gone under heavy fire in recent years and understandably so. It is a very uninteresting plot device. When someone is controlled into doing something, it's a spooky magic at work beyond our greatest understanding. However, when someone does something of their own volition, it's far more unsettling because it taps into one of mankind's greatest fears. The idea that we're all collectively pretty up and there's nothing we can do about it. 3707 glosses over the compulsion quickly in order to maximize the emotion drawn from the activity. The overall brevity of the piece works to its advantage in this respect. In summary, 3707 is concise, beautifully written, and deeply disturbing in one of the most comfortable ways. Sometimes you want something that resonates with you so strongly that it's almost intimate. Sometimes you want to feel something different. Sometimes you want to be forgotten. Thanks, Bitter Mixon. Now, the funny thing about mood is that feelings are subjective. While both Bitter Mixon and Chaltak mentioned how the skip is well written, writing technique is something that can be learned, taught, and recognized. How a piece of art makes you feel when you see it is highly subjective. It depends on who you are as a person and what your situation in life is at the moment you observe the art. This piece makes that abundantly clear in multiple ways, two of which I'm going to discuss. First, a cursory glance through the discussion page reveals a common thread of how people felt when reading this. Readers felt quietness, isolation, cold, distance. The imagery of a person driving alone on a deserted highway in the dead of night lends that common thread to many people easily. I personally was creeped out by the concept of disappearing into the night and being forgotten. But then, Buenos Dias Ratking and the Site 42 Discord pointed out that they felt that this skip wasn't creepy, but beautiful. The chance to escape a hellish life, not knowing if the life you find will be better or worse, but being willing to take the risk? I definitely didn't see it like that, but that's powerful right there. Communism said straight up in the discussion page, how you react to the thought of totally disappearing, never to be missed, probably depends a lot on how you feel about your life and the people in it. The other way we can ruminate on the mood of this skip is to think about the music that inspired it. Communism stated that this was a cold post written in a car while listening to Night Call by Kavinsky. I've installed a link. Pause this video, put on the song and read 3707. What you'll hear is crickets, a wolf howl, and then a slow driving heartbeat of bass and drums, the 80s synth blending an unnatural feel to the proceedings. It's easy to be entranced in the melancholy of the song in combination with the skip. Back on the discussion page, user The Great Hippo chimed in with an alternative soundtrack idea for the skip, The Way by Fastball. I've provided another link. Pause this, put on The Way, and read the skip again. I'll bet that your outlook on the story is a lot different this time around. The melancholy could easily be replaced by that upbeat, slacker optimism of leaving it all behind and living the wild highway life. Here we are with a canon song by the writer, but there's nothing to stop an observer from putting their own feelings, interpretations, and even soundtrack onto what is presented. And that wraps up today's episode of Researchers Notes. Let me know what you thought about the show in the comments and please continue discussing your thoughts and feelings on SCP-3707 down there. New Researchers Notes episodes are going to release about every two weeks, so you've got about two weeks to read the next skip and get your recording or transcript to me via Discord or email. Don't forget to check out the Site 42 Patreon, Merch Shop, and Discord server. And the next SCP we'll be dissecting is SCP-049, Plague Doctor by user Gabriel Jade. I'm sure this isn't going to get hate mail. See you next time, Foundation staff.