 Today we're going to talk about a problem the SCP authors run into, thematic consistency. But first, we need to thank a few of my Patreons. First up is Faye at the $5 tier for two months now. Next up is Samuelism at the $10 tier for two months. And finally, Dead Danny at the $20 tier. Glad you've decided to support my content. Thank you. An additional thank you to all my $1 patrons. Every little bit of helps and I definitely couldn't do this without you. Now for the rest of my viewers, I would very much appreciate it if you'd check out my Patreon page at patreon.com forward slash D. Samarian. I'll have a link in the description below. Onto the content. So a lot of times an SCP author will try to do three or four things at once with an article. And on the surface it can be very difficult to understand what's wrong with this approach. After all, a novel can run through half a dozen mini plots throughout its length or even have two or three subplots going on without an issue. So why can't this be done in an SCP? Well, first of all, there are no hard and fast rules. Writing is an art and there's a version of your SCP with six plot threads that people love, but often caution against it. And that's because you're not writing a novel and rarely are you even writing a short story. You're writing flash fiction and in flash fiction you have maybe 1500 words to get your entire plot across. Some pieces might be longer, but the percentage of articles and tales over 5000 words is pretty low. So you're probably writing either flash fiction or a very short short story. This means the page length is at a premium. If you want to tell a sad story and you devote 400 words to a funny side plot, you've not only lost your thematic consistency, but you've probably weakened both of the stories you were trying to tell. So don't try to tell two stories at once. If you have a separate thread you'd really like to pursue, go ahead and make that happen, but do it in a different story. Now part of understanding this can be recognizing what story you're trying to tell to the audience. Is it a sad story? Is it funny? Is it a science fiction adventure? Is it political satire? There are different ways to approach these types of stories and while you can certainly combine them, one of them absolutely needs to be a dominant element. If your story is a political satire that has a whole section devoted to how your fake president goes on a space adventure to Saturn, you're probably muddling your plot. By the way, that sounds kind of awesome, but you could drop the satire entirely and lean into the science fiction elements at that point. The important thing here is that your story drives towards a certain point. Detours aren't generally bad for reader enjoyment and bad for your pacing. This is by the way a problem that a lot of older authors can sometimes run into because pacing is a difficult thing to nail down, and moreover how to fix it is even more vaguely defined. And in works of the link that usually ends up on the wiki, I can tell you that side plots and unfocused narratives often ruin pacing, even for these established authors. But for newer authors, it's usually about the object itself, like the millipede that eats your eyes out and then controls your brain and then makes you dance the watusi until you dive exhaustion, then it desomfifies your corpse and makes you eat it subway. That's kind of a long walk. When you're jumping from one element to the next quickly, you lose the reader in between. Worse yet, newer authors often react to the critique of this is boring, but adding new elements or simply more details in an effort to spice things up. Instead of making it better, they often make their pacing worse, and in turn make the article even more boring. It goes against most people's instincts to make something more interesting by making it simpler, but this is actually more often than not the right path to making your article good. Why is that? Well as mentioned earlier, you have a small amount of words you can devote to a thing, so devoting more words to a single concept or idea means you can craft a more complex and detailed narrative around that concept, so keep it simple. If you want to be kept up to date on my content, hit the subscribe button and the notification bell next to that, and of course you can follow me on Twitter for channel updates at D. Cimmerian. Thanks for watching.