 One of the most important skills you need to have as an SCP writer is the ability to develop your ideas. I did a whole video in the past on my personal process of getting ideas, and I'll link to that will be in the description below, but that's really just the first step in your process. In fact, I'd argue that developing ideas is more important because at some point you'll be able to do the development without even having an initial idea to work from. Writing for the SCP Wiki isn't like writing a movie script or a novel. I mean sure, all writing shares some commonalities, but plenty of people forget that the SCP Wiki is primarily flash fiction, and flash fiction is by its nature very short, which means you can finish writing it in a short period of time, and people will finish reading it in even less time. You're not writing a television episode here even, you're writing a 5 to 10 minute story most of the time. The fact that people will finish your SCP very quickly means you really need to start chambering a new story as soon as you finish with the last one or else, you know, you're just going to have one article on the Wiki. The key to that is developing your ideas quickly. If you want to write more than an article every few months, you're going to have to learn to work with ideas that you're not always enthusiastic about, or even ideas that are very basic. I'm sitting in my discord recently, and there'll be a link to that in the description below, and someone asked me if I had any ideas, and I don't always have ideas. I don't always immediately great, in fact I can probably count the number of great ideas I've had on just both hands, but for every idea that I've had that I've been really excited to write about, I've also had 10 that were just bland in the beginning. But when I asked, I created an idea from whole cloth on the spot. Dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate along the ground. This is non-anomalous, this is actually how dung beetles work, but what if a subspecies of dung beetles suddenly began to act as if the stars were completely gone? Not on the surface that doesn't sound even really very anomalous, but the trick is in the development. So let me walk you through how you can take an idea like that and turn it into something that's a workable story. Now first you have the beetles, why are they acting as if the stars are gone? How you go about answering that question can change the whole development of an idea. Now I went with because the stars are actually gone, and the beetles are the only ones who can see it. Now you have to ask what that means in detail, are the stars gone already, and we're the ones seeing things that aren't there when we look up, or are the beetles seeing the sky as it is without regards to the speed of light for some other unrelated reason? Now the last answer works for me. So let's say that the dung beetles can see things as they are regardless of the distance and limitations of the speed of light. This is actually a testable behavior, and it's super anomalous by the way. So the story begins to develop from there, you start with a natural low stakes and weird anomaly. This species of beetle is beginning to go extinct, and you can elevate it along the way, but then some conservationist figures out it's because they're acting as if the stars aren't there, and if you fake the Milky Way star field they can still navigate perfectly fine, so why is that? The foundation notices that small oddity, and they investigate, discovering that the beetles can actually see things as they are regardless of distance with some testing, and then you realize, oh shit, that means something is blotting out the stars. Of course, the guy who asked for an idea responded with eh not feeling it before any development was applied. This is an important issue with old and new writers, a lot of people will only write for an idea that grabs them and excites them. This approach will be frustrating when you go long periods without an idea that you like, and by the way this is going to lead to you saying you don't have ideas when you really don't have ideas that excite you. And by the way, along the way of writing you'll often find better ways to portray your story. Details that you worked out in the initial stages are fluid, and they should remain that way, maybe dung beetles don't work, maybe stars don't work. Be prepared to alter details along the way if they make for a better story. And sometimes the path an idea takes is not something you personally would be any good at writing. Everyone's good at writing different kinds of stories, or maybe what you've developed just doesn't work, or you have an idea now that you are excited about why you were developing the story. So stop, give up on the idea, don't beat a dead horse. If you have something better in mind, work on that. And if the idea that you're working on right now is a dead end, stop and go to something else. Anyway, that's it. If you enjoyed it, please hit the subscribe button and the notification bell next to that. And if you want to support my content, like these fine folk, go to patreon.com. A link to that and this channel's discord will be in the description below. Thanks for watching.