 Recently, one of my subscribers named BigBullsMaggie asked on a video about what monster manual entries were and why they are understood to be a bad thing to write. So first of all, there are no absolutes in the writing process. Any bad idea or format can be utilized in such a way as to create a great work. But let's start with what a monster manual entry is. To D&D nerds like myself, this may be a somewhat clearly apparent thing, but to others I can see how it could be confusing. So imagine you have an encyclopedia of animals, and each entry describes a different animal in one to three paragraphs. Now imagine the focus of those paragraphs is less on the history of the animals and more on what they can and can't do, like the entry on the cheetah focusing in on how it's the fastest sprinter in the animal kingdom. Now take the encyclopedia, add supernatural elements to some of the entries. That's a monster manual. So why is this bad? Well, it's more of a pitfall for new writers than it is necessarily a rule that these are bad. And it's important to remember that a lot of the most popular articles on the wiki are essentially just monster manual entries. 173 is probably your best example in that it's basically just telling you about a concrete statue that can do some pretty incredible things. The problem is without serious previous writing experience, these articles are always a lot less engaging than they could be, and it teaches them the wrong lessons about writing for the site. Now imagine you're reading an encyclopedia. For a little while that could hold your attention. It could certainly get your imagination going, but are you gonna finish that book? And if you do, are you gonna go out and find another encyclopedia to read afterwards? The answer to these questions is probably no. People can stick with a single genre for their entire life and they can reread the same story more than once and find enjoyment out of it. But if we say the same structure in our fiction enough, it will become repetitive and boring. And then it's part of the limitation of the SCP format, but it's also part of the limitations of there being as many SCP articles as there are now. It is incredibly difficult now to do something whose structure hasn't already been done a dozen times over. Most SCP articles are flash fiction rather than short stories. So a basic weird object, which is essentially just a story pitch, can work. But oftentimes it's done clumsily. I mean you'll end up seeing stuff like this is Melvin and he can shoot fire out of his eyes and he's impossible to kill. And the foundation has to be very nice to him or else he'll kill them all. And then you'll also see that kind of article get down-moded. Though it's telling that in the early site history these articles were succeeded by tales which helped flesh them out more. A modern SCP, especially by a new author, generally needs to do all of that in one place, the chances of a reader going to read your specific tale after they're done with your article is pretty close to zero. This is why building a narratively focused SCP is usually the right choice for new authors. Again, especially if they have no serious experience with writing before coming to the site. But once you've established yourself in both experience and success, you can start to think about how to pair back on narrative and just present an object if that's what you want. Hopefully by that point you'll have an instinctual sense of what does and doesn't work and what can be excised from the article without sacrificing quality. Let's examine the last SCP I posted on the site and it was last month in fact. SCP-3316, which is currently rated at plus 128. SCP-3316 is one of the shortest articles I've written for the site and it's just about a town where people's eyeballs pop out of their sockets at night, go to an empty building and fight until just before dawn. And that's it. When I think about an article like this, I tend to think about it in the terms of how it makes a reader feel rather than what my anomaly can do. In this case, it's just bafflingly odd, which ties into ommetaphobia, in which a lot of people have on some level. The purpose of this is to make the reader feel, for lack of a better term, squicked out. So of course you can write something with no deeper story and have it succeed on the wiki. But you're gonna do that last by focusing in on cool new abilities and more on how you want the reader to feel when they read the article. When people say, don't write a thing that does a thing, the unmentioned subtext is until you know what you're doing. Now that's all. If you liked this video, hit the subscribe button and share it. And follow me on Twitter at D. Samarian. Thanks for watching.