格式随笔

介绍

这篇文档是不同作者的创作谈的合集，描绘了他们在写作时各自的内心想法。我希望通过这种收集写作感想、让作者自荐作品的做法，这篇文档可以为新接触SCP基金会的作者提供不拘一格的介绍，以帮助他们了解在作者创作时会使用的方法。

这里的每个条目都直接来自于作者，讨论他们在写作时的心理活动。你想知道的：他们有什么目标、他们怎样整合想法、他们对同样想做这件事的人有什么建议……这里全都有。除了描述创作过程之外，作者们也会选出单独的几篇作品，评价它们是怎样反映他们的创作过程的。作者们同样会推荐他们觉得最能反映自己写作心态的文章。

这个合集由几个部分组成：管理员、版主、运营人员、初级工作人员和成员。每个部分都按字母顺序排列。每位作者最多可以推荐三篇他们觉得最能代表自己创作手法的文章或故事，同时提供评价和描述。这是一个活的文档，会定期编辑，以添加作者和编辑已存在的评价，尽可能跟上每位作者的更新。

我的希望是，通过为网站收集这样一份创作者的活文档，我可以帮大家感受到我们拥有的文学作品和创作它们的思维方式的多样性。

常见问答

谁负责这个页面？
维护这个合集的人是SoullessSingularity，他拥有这个页面的最终解释权。如果你有任何的疑问/担忧/建议等等，可以给他发私信。

谁能加入这个合集？
任何符合以下准则的作者都欢迎：
1. 至少有一篇文章的得分在60以上；
2. 是社区的一部分，不仅在写作方面有贡献，而且在批评、审阅和讨论方面都有贡献。
也有一些例外；有些作者可能不是很活跃，但他们对社区做出了很多贡献，值得在这里得到认可。

我怎样才能加入合集呢？
给我（SoullessSingularity）发私信请求加入就可以了。如果我接受了，我会问你的描述、评价和三篇最能体现你风格的文章或者故事。要是在微乎其微的情况下我第一次没有接受你的请求，也不用着急；这个文档不会很快就消失掉，你随时可以再试一次。目前为止，我拒绝某个人的唯一一个原因就是他们入站还不到一周。

为什么某位作者不在这里？
可能只是因为我忘了问！我不是无处不在的，有可能就不小心漏掉了几个很棒的作者。如果你觉得我漏了一个重要的作者，请随时发请求给我。我会代表你给他们发信息，要求他们分享他们思维过程中的奇迹。

如果我的描述不再准确了，我该怎么办？
让我知道有什么地方要改！这个文档是活的，我不介意改东西让它们保持最新。只要给我发条信息，指出哪里要改和怎么改就行了。

管理员

anqxyr

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1797，SCP-1511，SCP-1600}

点击展开anqxyr的感想和自评

总是从一个点子开始的。它们来得毫无征兆，而且我也没法控制。有一次我一个星期就想出了十二个点子。但更多的时候，我几个月都想不出一个新点子。我会把每个点子都记下来，虽然有时候可能只写一两个字来提醒。我总是很喜欢我的点子，而且对它们感觉很兴奋。但其实，这个阶段的点子多半是狗屎。一旦你有了个点子，总能在后来提升一下。

然后就是写作了。我会在一个点子上思考几周，有时候是几个月，在脑内移除或者增加元素。然后我坐下来，开始写作，然后在第一句话上就卡死，觉得这些字怎么看也不对。然后我就又放上个几星期。然后我再回来，把什么都写出来，发现它根本不合格，然后再等上两年。

我的写作过程好像挺糟糕的。

大部分我雕琢的点子都已经有些年头了，都是我几年前想出来然后就再也没碰过的，或者是我有试过写但没成功的。我会在我的点子上想很多，然后在想的时候就会有很多事情发生。我会改变与异常效应相关的对象，或者稍微调整一下异常效应本身。我把点子拆分成最基本的想法，然后颠覆或者反转它们，而不是直接把它们写出来。如果点子的核心比较无聊，我就添加细节把它变得有趣起来。这个过程有时候会失控，我会得到一大堆勉强凑在一起的缝合怪，那我就只能回到最开始，一切重来。最后我会想办法把它变得又短又简单。一个核心点子，加上一两个和它相关的小点子，可能是所谓的“卖点”或者“反转”。我在这里叫它们“小点子”，因为大部分时候它们不是我对已有的想法探索和发展得出的，而是需要另一个灵光一闪的时刻。这些小点子应当对核心想法有所补充，并且从中自然地流露出来。要是它们不能很好地结合在一起，那整篇文章就会变得很分裂。如果你有很多这样的小点子，就算它们放在一起很合适，它们也可能会淹没那个核心点子，最后整篇文章又成了一团乱麻。

我尽量不去用[编辑]，除非完全有必要。我也不用黑条遮住日期、名字或者地点。在过去两年我写的所有文章里，我只用了四个黑条，而我觉得这四个黑条是对删除痕迹使用的优秀范例。

SCP-1797：小猫流感
“这是我写作过程顺利进行的一个例子。我差不多只花了一天不到的时间就把它写完了，但我思考了这个点子两个月，直到我对怎么结尾有了一个“啊哈！”的想法之后才开始动笔。它的效果很好还因为它颠覆了人们对身体恐怖病毒的想象：这种病毒不会杀死宿主，这些小猫不会吃掉宿主的内脏，而事实上就和正常的流感一样，宿主可以不用任何特殊的治疗就好起来。”

SCP-1511：移动乐园
“而这篇则是我的写作过程极度不顺利的一个例子了，虽然从文章中看不出来。它的核心点子是‘一块会自己慢慢移动的石头’，可能是我想到过最无聊的点子了。为了减轻这一点，我开始给它加入很多细节和元素，但没一个是合适的。我花了四个月的时间尝试不同的方法，还差不多完全重写了几次。最后，我删掉了所有的草稿，回到最初的核心想法，尝试用最简单的方法充实它。这时候我才想到把它写成一个像监狱一样的东西，结果和这个skip其余的部分都配合得非常好。

“值得注意的是，在我想办法简化细节的过程中，我把这个东西从一个单一的晶体变成了300个不同的晶体。简化有时候并不意味着减少数量或者规模。”

SCP-1600：贤者奶酪
“这篇的成功大部分不是因为写作技巧或者是别出心裁的修辞颠覆，而是因为一个很好的核心想法。不过尽管如此，这些还是很有用的。”

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Dexanote

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-517，SCP-1479，SCP-1679}

点击展开Dexanote的感想和自评

我尽可能在阅读或者做白日梦的时候保持思维的开放。有时候，一个想法就这样突然跑到我脑袋里；可能是一个形象，一个概念，或者一个“如果……会怎样？”的假设。就是一个小小的灵感，让我感觉它可能会变成更大的东西。这些东西可能会来自于一张照片，一个冰箱逻辑¹，也有可能只是我的脑洞。

比如说，SCP-517是在我半梦半醒的时候想到的。我看到幽灵的手臂从我家地下室里伸出来，把我拽下两层楼梯，直奔向地狱；这个效应还没有在别的文章里写到过。所以我想到了一个办法把它用起来。我思考还有什么东西还没被用过，可以作为异常效应的触发点；在一个星期里，我把这个点子给IRC上不同的人看了几次，最后Burns建议我用预言机作为附加这个异常效应的实物。所以我就先写了一页，发去求详细的评价；然而，它还不完美，有人（大概是Aelanna）担心“会伸长的怪手”这个点子会很傻。我想让人发自内心地感觉到手臂成为了无法阻止的毁灭的恐怖感，所以我回去写了事故报告来达到这一点。我试了几次，但最后还是把这篇SCP写出来了。它是某个不一样的东西，那时候还没有人这么写过，到现在也还没有人写类似的东西。

你的SCP首先应当唤起某种感情。敬畏、害怕、“这啥鬼”、恐怖、愤怒、悲伤、好奇、幽默，什么都可以。517是害怕和敬畏。我希望读者能感觉到这东西有多可怕。我没有办法让读者经历我躺在床上半梦半醒时的谵妄，所以我就做了第二棒的事情：我制造了一场噩梦。不和情感挂钩的话，你的SCP就只是一个会做某件事情的东西，那就很无聊了。当你找到了那个形象，那个你想让其他人感受的东西，你要想办法把那感觉用文字表达出来。

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DrClef

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-231，守门者（SCP-001提案），SCP-835}

点击展开DrClef的感想和自评

我通常的写作过程都是从一个想法开始的。比如说：“要是恐惧是体现在收容措施里，而不是收容对象上，那会怎样？”或者“要是SCP基金会维基走向了一个不同的方向，那会怎样？”我通常会猜测作者们可能会写的东西，然后要么颠覆它，要么彻底反对它。一般来说，我倾向于震惊我的读者或者把他们推出舒适区。这是我不好的一面。

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Drewbear

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-540，SCP-1045，SCP-1543}

点击展开Drewbear的感想和自评

我更喜欢写古怪的东西，而不是吓人的或者恐怖的东西，而且它们的本质往往相当简单。我开始写作的情况一般是一个点子灵光一闪，或者我在现实生活中看到了一件东西/一个现象，或者看到其他人尝试了一个想法但失败了，我就想用它试试看。比起完全原创，我更适合在已经存在的东西上发挥。我也倾向于一口气写完初稿，然后只做一些最小的改动，一般只是语气或者小的想法调整。而那些我没能一口气写完的，我经常要花上几个月，让它们在脑海里慢慢酝酿。不过，我也会研究我想法基于的东西，这样我就能充分地把它建立在现实上了。我的大部分作品最后都是小短篇而不是完整的故事，不过那只是因为我实在不擅长写连贯的剧情。

SCP-540
这篇是从标题的双关语开始的，最后呈现出了现在的样子。写这篇的时候我查了很多资料，确保军械没写错，还问了军事人员以保证从军事角度看这篇里的东西都没出什么错误。

SCP-1045
这篇是回应Bright提出的挑战，它直接基于我自己的一个蜡烛灯笼，我看着它，试着想出能让它变得恐怖、又不直接和火焰有关的办法。这是我目前为止最短的一篇文章，但也是最有效果的一篇，正是因为它留了很大的想象空间。它呈现了一个已存在的物品的改编版本，用的是我“灵光一闪+一口气写完”的办法，也是和我大部分作品一样的小短篇。

SCP-1543
这篇是很稀有的基于故事的SCP，它的灵感来源可以说是一个被放弃的想法，来自于某个愤怒离开的用户的糟糕草稿。我花了几个月才把这篇写好，主要是因为我希望能在记录里把那种情感冲击表现出来，但又不想用力过猛。

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Roget

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：欢乐基金会，SCP-744，SCP-1833}

点击展开Roget的感想和自评

嗯，当我坐下来写作的时候，经常是因为这一天的某个时候，我被一个想法击中了。我就是非常喜欢写作，所以我常常在想到那个物品的当天就把SCP写出来，因为我很享受创作和发表的过程。我真的没有什么写文章的正统方式，它发生得很快，而且很依赖我写的速度。我一般只会认真构思那些我觉得真的很好的点子。但大部分的流程都是：1. 在开车时或者上课时想到概念；2. 写下草稿；3. 得到反馈；4. 发表。我真的已经垄断了“好得值得一个upvote”的市场，而我大部分的作品都可以描述为“点子很好，可以再多花点时间来开发”。

有人问我怎么就不会卡文。答案是，我真的不知道。我要是在写作的时候感觉有障碍或者烦恼，我也不会强迫自己继续。我会去玩玩角色扮演，或者写篇图书馆，或者练习画欧洲大陆的地图。最后一项我已经做得很好了，因为我总是去画地图。所以，这就是我对你们卡文的时候怎么办给出的建议啦！去凭印象画欧洲大陆的地图就好。

SCP-744 - 仍需组装
“这是我在一天内写的三篇文章中的一篇。我猜另外两篇有一篇是关于MC&D仆人的，还有一篇我也不记得了。无论如何，这篇在一天里就写完了。它先是一个概念，会做某事的工厂，然后有一些访谈和附录来完善它。你会在我很多作品里发现这个结构——表达一个想法，然后用附录来完善。”I think the other two were my MC&D servant thing and something else that I don't remember.

SCP-1833 - 76年班班级年鉴。
“76年班可能是我写过的系列文章里最满意的一组，它以‘昏厥交响曲’的异常为中心，由很多交叉链接组成。但是当我写这篇的时候，我的想法只是写一篇和高中有关的SCP。我在聊天里问过，本来是想写一个异常的高中同学聚会，但最后写了一本会做吓人事情的年鉴。我和Site19²头脑风暴了一晚上，然后我在睡觉前把它发了出来。后来，我写了一篇续集，然后又是一篇，然后是《追忆》……就这样，这个雪球越滚越大。我依然深情地望着它们，还觉得每个人都应该像这样写交叉链接文。它构建了一个世界，把一切都放在了一起。”

欢乐基金会
“把它放在这里好像有点作弊，因为这是我做的设定，而不是一篇故事，不过管他呢！我想干什么就干什么！我花了大概六个月的时间才把这个设定中心做起来，让大家对它感兴趣，还写了其中的故事。讽刺的是，我本以为会是第二篇的故事，Anaxagoras写的那篇，到目前为止还没有发布³。不过还有其他很多才华横溢的作者，比如说Clef、Troy、FortuneFavorsBold和ihpkmn等，给它写了故事。看到努力得到回报真的很有成就感。我们甚至还准备给它做前传故事……看看要不要再花六个月的时间吧。”

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Silberescher

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1502，SCP-609，SCP-2005}

点击展开Silberescher的感想和自评

我的想法来自于我能接受到的任何一个地方，但一般来说，我能做的最有创造力的事情是不去想问题。
如果我需要想出什么东西，我会集中精神地思考，比喻性地把头在墙上撞，直到我比喻性的脑袋开始发痛；然后我会彻底把它抛到脑后，去玩电子游戏、填字游戏，或者其他不相干的活动，但还在潜意识里想着它。最后会有一个主意从不知道哪里冒出来，但当然了，它肯定不是凭空出现的，我的大脑在我不给它监工的时候一直在工作。
顺便提一句，通过短信或者IRC和其他人聊天对这个过程是非常有益的，因为汇集不同的想法这件事本身就可以给你很多点子。我绝大多数的SCP点子都是我在网站聊天室里晃悠的时候想出来的。
所以，如果你需要我写什么东西，却抓到我在到处乱逛的话，相信我，这绝对不是拖延症犯。这是我完整的创作过程中不可或缺的步骤。So, if you need some writing from me and catch me derping around instead, trust me, it's definitely not procrastination. It's an integral step in the creative process.

SCP-1502 — If I pitched a lot of the basic premises of my SCPs cold, the reception would be less than stellar. "A self-help book that really works but makes you crazy." "SCP-173, but he's a kitty." "A tiny monster that does surgery on you to make you look like that old teacher from that sitcom."
But those articles are effective because of how much effort I put into the execution. Sometimes, to paraphrase a comment on 1502, you can take a bad idea and just keep going and make it good.
SCP-1425 uses the object itself for a lengthy narrative about well-known figures being driven insane by an abyss of unreality. SCP-173-J is just a ton of jokes of varying quality that riff on the relatively bland premise, and statistically some of them tend to land.

SCP-609 — This is a good example of how even a small idea can be developed into something effective, if you're willing listen to others and rework it.
The original version was typed up when Soulless dared us on IRC to write very short SCPs and break the "rule of thumb". It was a telepathic ball-bearing that moved wherever you thought about while you were looking at it.
Of course, the chat response was "it needs more", so I gradually expanded it with the list of destinations, the controlled movement… then Drewbear suggested that it be a more interesting object, like a billiard ball, and that's when it clicked for me, and the focus of the article shifted.
The style, incidentally, was a reaction to an issue I'd encountered in my previous posts: while mystery tends to be important to the urban-fantasy tone that many SCPs go for, and it's at the core of horror, revealing too little can merely leave your audience confused. SCP-1502 is a prime example.
609's horror is a little lighter and subtler, and the premise is abstract and philosophically involved, so I decided to leave as little of the basic anomaly to the reader's imagination as I could. It seems to have been for the best.

SCP-2005 — This article illustrates a lot of my creative weaknesses, I think.
I've got plenty of ideas, but forming actual narrative with those ideas is much harder than coming up with them, and I tend to go quite a long time without an idea that I can build a story for.
So here, I came out with the premise of making each of the entries also a window into Foundation history, which ended up being a headcanon dump, a tanglebang of lore-based concepts, each of which bears little coherence with the article.
Also, I can't edit my own stuff very well, because I'm too biased on what to keep and what to cut. While I do have a few trusted people that I especially seek out for feedback, everyone ends up liking a different passage particularly, and it gets to the point where one can't snip a sentence without disappointing someone. But leave everything in and the resulting mess disappoints everyone. Remind me to rewrite that thing someday.

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SoullessSingularity

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1252，衰老，消耗，迫害，SCP-747}

点击展开SoullessSingularity的感想和自评

我主要有两种写作方法：感觉优先或者项目优先。然而，对我来说，在写作时最重要的是要有我想让读者感觉到的东西。失落。悲哀。欢乐。绝望。我的第一种方法，感觉优先，通常是在我还不知道项目本身是什么、但已经确定了想让读者有什么感觉时的做法。用这种方法，我会把和这种感觉结合起来的东西当作项目，不管它一开始看起来有多抽象。第二种方法，项目优先，常常是我对某个形象或者某个主题着迷时的做法。我的写作目的就会随之变成“让读者感觉到我个人对那件物品所感觉到的东西”。

基本上，我成功的原因多半是我能够把概念和感觉联系起来，反映我奇特的思维方式。对新手，我会推荐你们问问自己：“这个对我来说意味着什么？”“我为什么想写这个？”“我想让读者感觉到什么？”。在你知道目的地的时候，写作之路就变得清晰了。

SCP-1252 - “半成的理念”
“这是我目前得分最高的文章。它最初的点子真的就是一个字面上的‘未完成的理念’，一个在完全想明白之前就被放弃了的概念。最初的草稿写了那位想象中的朋友知道了他珍爱的Suzie已经死了，乞求忘记或被杀，但我后来选择了就让幻想活在幻想之中。在我脑海里，一个孩子对世界说谎，以补偿自己想象中的朋友已经不在了的事实；在这篇文章里，这个世界对那位想象中的朋友说谎，以补偿那个孩子已经不在了的事实。”

senescence-consumption-persecution
“我为鼠巢设定写了这篇文，因为我没法拒绝Faminepulse。我超爱鼠巢。我喜欢它的概念，和它探究的腐烂世界。到头来，是人们想要收容、镇压和毁灭异常的行为导致了异常超越一切的后果。”

SCP-747 - “玩偶鬼童”
“这是我的第一个‘重大成功’，它的成就也是最先让我感觉到自己在基金会有了一席之地的原因之一。虽然发表了有段时间了，‘玩偶鬼童’可能是我怎样把东西联想起来然后呈现在文章里的最清楚的例子。这篇基本上是我对‘童年的玩偶崇拜’的迷恋，加上‘转变’的概念，以及人们逐渐丧失用来感知周围世界的东西。”"This is pretty much my fascination with childhood adoration to dolls paired with the concept of transformation and the progressive loss of what people use to perceive the world around them."

---

Zyn

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-348，SCP-1457，SCP-1443}

点击展开Zyn的感想和自评

我感觉我的作品主要是想唤起一种情感或者异世感，毕竟我这辈子都写不出什么吓人的东西。这两个方面是我主要的灵感来源，而且我写的SCP们也常常是Safe级别的常见物品（蝴蝶啦，汤碗啦，玻璃瓶啦，贝壳啦）。

我的构思过程通常包括在我旧手机的照片里寻找有背景的东西，能引导我想出连贯的背景故事和伴随图片的描述。很多都只是“大脑呕吐（？）”；我把它们记在一个本子上，有感觉的时候就会扩写。要是不想扩写，我就把它们留在那里，等哪天再回来看看。我尽量写出能让人可以在日常生活中联想到的故事，这样这个SCP好像就更有可信度，更能让人浮想联翩了。The ideas process I have usually involves digging through my old cell phone pictures to find something with context that can lead me to think up a coherent backstory and narrative accompanying the picture. A lot of it is just "brain barf";

所有这些的例子有……大概是SCP-348、SCP-1457和SCP-1443，它们都配了我从手机里找出来的图片。我用手机拍的这些照片都是我看到后想记住的一些日常事物，比如说桥边的两杯珍珠奶茶、我或家人做的饭，或者自然不常见的一面。大多数情况下，我写的SCP都和它的背景故事有关：348是最明显的（我父亲给我做了那碗汤），1457是一只我照顾了八个月的受伤的蝴蝶（那是在我高中最后一年的时候，毕业前的几个星期，我总是感觉很孤独，因为我的朋友们都开始疏远了），而1443的照片是在我大学校园里拍的（我当时在吃午饭，因为快到考试时间了，我正感觉昏昏欲睡，但是这些叶子的形状让我产生了兴趣）。

基本上，我从日常生活中把想法提取出来，然后让这个世界变得更有“魔力”一点，我找不到更好的词了。

***

版主

LurkD

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：无}

点击展开LurkD的感想和自评

这些是我个人的写作指南。不是一大片文字，因为我更喜欢这种格式。

1. 相信：相信你读者的想象力比你能写出来的要精彩十倍。
2. 反派：反派比主角更重要。
3. 火花：摩擦产生火花；个性从火中生发。
4. 勺子：不要把内容事无巨细地一勺一勺喂给读者。
5. 联系：让你的读者能与主题产生联系。
6. 演化：让你的故事在笔下自然演化。
7. 向前：永远别写同样的东西。

---

Randomini

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1314，Cool之战（中心）}

点击展开Randomini的感想和自评

任何一篇文章最重要的部分就是文字。不管你脑海里有没有宏大的构思都没有关系：不管你怎么写，你想表达的东西都不是读者会想象出来的东西。你可能会犯的最大的错误就是不留一点解释的空间。如果你过度解释某物的物理性质，你就是在浪费本可以用来描述行为的时间。故事（一般来说）并不是由地点、角色、物品或者随便哪个“亮点事物（？）”组成的。故事的核心是亮点事物（？）之间的互动：角色之间发生对话，鸟儿从天上飞过，喷泉朝空中喷射出水花。故事是关于行为和变化的。我的写作风格是常常会陷入纯对话，只偶尔打断来解释内心想法，或者表情，或者情感。如果你想写一篇故事，你的重点应该放在发生的事情上而不是描述上。另一方面，如果你想写一篇SCP，请尽可能保持客观超然。找出适当的语气：学会像科学家一样写作。The most important part of any piece of writing is the words. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got some glorious vista envisioned in your head: no matter how you write it, what you’re trying to convey is not what the reader is going to imagine. The biggest mistake you can possibly make is leaving nothing to interpretation. If you over-explain the physical properties of things, you’re wasting time that could be spent on describing actions. Stories (in general) are not made of places, or characters, or objects, or any particular setpiece. The core of a story is in the interaction between setpieces: characters having conversations, birds flying through the sky, a fountain shooting spurts of water into the air. Stories are about action and change. My writing style often lapses into pure dialogue, occasionally breaking to explain an internal thought, or expression, or emotion. If you’re writing a tale, the majority of what you’re writing should be things happening rather than description. On the other hand, if you’re writing an SCP, stay as descriptive and clinical as possible. Figure out the right tone: learn to write like a scientist.

Inspiration and ideas are recombinative. Whenever you’re writing something, it’s not going to be completely original; no ideas come from nowhere. The important part of writing is making sure that you don’t use ideas that people see all the time. It’s fine to draw inspiration from something, but at the very least, impart it with enough differences so that you’re not making a carbon copy. Never build anything on just one idea; at the same time, don’t build anything on a million ideas. Figure out what you want to say, then say it, and make sure you say it well. Stuff like alliteration, or allusion, or whatever? That stuff seemed stupid at school, but somehow, sentences so constructed sound more solid. When in doubt, alliterate. Don’t be illiterate. To your audience, be considerate, and sometimes, fuck rhyming. It might be a subconscious thing, but the way that you say something is perhaps more important than what you’re actually saying. If you can make reading big blocks of prose fun, you’re more able to engage the reader with the stuff you actually want to get across.

Don’t get attached to things you write; you’ll fight criticism that can help you get better. At the same time, realise the difference between criticism of your writing style and criticism of your ideas, and be open to changing both of them. On top of that, realise that you’re never going to be able to satisfy everyone, and indeed, you probably shouldn’t try to. The most important thing to keep in mind: write something that you would want to read.

---

Vincent_Redgrave

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1541，SCP-1810，SCP-1910}

点击展开Vincent_Redgrave的感想和自评

For all my ideas, I tend to take inspiration from conversations, media, and other things of that nature. Sometimes, it’ll just be a joke that someone else tells based on the Skip’verse or a random idea that pops into my head (more on that later), or even thinking of weird and common tropes in fiction or twists on urban legends ( still trying to get the damn Bloody Mary disco ball idea to work, to no avail). Once I’ve gathered a few dozen of these ideas (despite the general consensus that this is a Bad Idea) I tend to just start dart-boarding on them until something sticks in my head long enough for me to care. Then, I begin expanding on it in some way, either thinking of ways to improve the base concept’s strength, or ways to make it more interesting and add more to the overall idea. Overall, I really like doing something different. I hate feeling like I’m just doing bog-standard retreads of tired ideas, and will push for as much innovation as I can.

After that, I just start writing, and then I have a core group of reviewers (something very important to cultivate on this site) I always speak to in order to make sure the idea is sound, my writing sounds tonally appropriate for the situation, and that everything is as realistic as an article or tale could sound. I also tend to pay a great deal of attention to the technical details, running it by many of our experts on the site in the relevant fields. A lot of footwork goes into these as well, such as consulting Wikipedia and various other databases for information where my on-site research and consultations fall short. From there, it’s mostly review, rewrite, and repeat until it’s up to what I feel is acceptable.

Now, to illustrate the above, I’m going to talk about three pieces, two articles and one tale, that I feel are my best contributions to this website and kind of show my general mindset when it comes to writing or coming up with ideas.
First, there’s my article SCP-1541, the Drunk God. This article was born from a rather sleep-deprived night after I had binged on a lot of Eldritch-abomination-y media and came up with the phrase “The Drunk-Text of Cthulhu”. I will also admit that American Gods had no small part in inspiring it, what with the “fallen gods trying to make it in the modern world” thing. However, I deny all allegations that Discworld had anything to do with it. I only ever got halfway through the first book before losing interest. (Allow me to gather my things and get a decent head start before y’all grab the torches and pitchforks.) This guy is my favorite article that I produced, and what I generally consider to be my finest contribution to the site, although it is (at the time of this writing) lower rated than my “best” one, SCP-1810.

It has a lot of what I feel are my hallmarks: a ridiculous premise taken to a sad/realistic conclusion, a strong knowledge-base and a lot of research into the background and minor details, such as the Ethanol cloud that the big guy is camped out at, and a lot of references to other things, like the frogmen, or the ritual of blood and wine, which were meant to be a shout-out to rituals that followers of Dionysus/Bacchus would perform in ye olden dayes, were thrown in as well because it was fun… I did my research for the text log by logging a drunken member of our community that wandered into chat one night, which was hilarious in and of itself. All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable article for me to write, and I’m glad that it’s been accepted well in some of our peripheral fandom such as TvTropes, Reddit, and Tumblr.

The next article I’m going to talk about was my very first one, which I am very proud of, SCP-1910. This is a prime example of my research skills and tapping resources among the site for help. I received a lot of help from Photosynthetic, one of our staff members who specializes in botany and biology, in constructing and fleshing out (heh) the effects and analogues between plant and animal matter. I also got a ton of help from Djoric, initially and throughout, to work out my basic idea and come up with an interesting twist on an old urban legend of a pink mist that kills people and vanishes their bodies. This article is important to me as an example of how an article can actually be decently-received and survive, even if you’re new to the site, so long as you are willing to seek and receive help from others and be flexible about your ideas.

Now, the final piece that I’m going to talk about is my tale Ignition, Part One- The Artists, a tale in the Et Tam Deum Petivi canon. This tale is one of my favorite contributions to the site. It shows a side of two of the more popular GOI’s that most people don’t bother depicting- The Church of the Broken God, or at least the sect depicted here, is far more moderate and peaceful than the mainstream “Oil-soaked cyborg terrorist” angle that most people play them up as, and the Artists here are not some “More Hipster Than Thou” carnage junkies that get off by ramping up the bodycount, faux-philosophical rambling, and godawful attempts at art. These guys are just a trio of wizards that like to goof off, make art, and dress a bit weird for the mainstream.

This tale is one of my proudest achievements, as it’s setting the stage for some more awesomeness to come in the immediate future, if I can find the free time to write about it. Revolution is so much fun to write, and I gladly encourage anyone reading this to take up a similar idea of writing these groups of interest in a way that comes naturally to the group but might not be the first thing that most people would think of, or might even run counter to the popular image. It’s worked for me so far, ya know?

So, yeah… that’s pretty much it. I don’t have a whole a lot more to talk about my work, but I’ll gladly field any questions directed towards my inbox or in chat about my work, and encourage any new writers looking for some help or advice to drop me a line as well. I hope this was helpful. :D

***

运营人员

Fantem

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1903，SCP-1913，SCP-1619}

点击展开Fantem的感想和自评

When it comes to getting ideas for my writing, I'm a bit random. I'm usually browsing DeviantArt or the Visual Records or Picture is Unrelated, and if I see something I like, I save it to an image folder, and have it in the back of my mind for later.

I almost never really plan it out more than I need to, but if I do, I make the plans very general so I can hammer everything out easier if I need/want to change something. I find that if I plan everything out in detail before I write, it either ends up falling on top of itself, or I don't refer to the plan at all. I've heard of people who do plan everything out, and their work turns out great, so I guess it really depends on how your preferred method.

Getting the mood right for writing is fairly important too. I prefer to write on my tablet in public as opposed to on my computer in my own home. Places like bars, restaurants, and cafés are great places because for some reason, I'm more likely to get more done when people are walking around and making me uncomfortable. Then there are the drinks. I drink a lot of soda while writing… Like, a lot. It's just easier to think straight when I'm jittering over my tablet like a maniac, but again, that's just me. Others might be more inclined to write in a calmer state of mind.

As for ideas, I read a lot of mythology, urban legends, and appropriately enough, creepypasta. You probably could point to any obscure myth or urban legend out there, and I would probably know about it, and if I didn't, I'd at least know where to look. It's a fun thing to read about, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a major influence on my stuff.

Honestly, I think the best advice I could give for writing boils down to this:

Read and watch the kind of stuff you like, and take note of the narratives behind them. Study the parts that made you feel enthralled or invested, specifically for what kinds of tropes they used and how they used them, and experiment.

When you finish writing for the day, don't finish a scene unless you're actually done with the draft. When you do that, you tend to think about your story and how to improve it.

Find a place to write, preferably out of your home, and in a public area.

This is going to be a brash statement, but fuck worrying about being original. I remember tossing so many ideas out the window because someone already wrote about an object with a vaguely similar effect. Listen, there's nothing wrong with taking influence from something. You know SCP-1903? It started out with me cleaning out my phone's photo library, and finding an image I've never seen before in the process. I came up with a basic info-hazard effect for it that turns you into something else.

That itself isn't very original is it? I could probably point you to several things that do something similar, but only artificially. 1903 only borrows from that trope to propel a different story with it as opposed to… you know… ripping them off or relying only on that point.

And finally, write shit, ask questions later. You got an idea? Great. Puke it on the paper now, and rearrange it once you've got it written down. I believe Kurt Vonnegut said there were two kinds of writers: swoopers, those who puke the whole draft onto the page and edit it a whole bunch all at once, and bashers, those who spit-up sentences or paragraphs and work on those until they're perfect, and then do it again till the next paragraph.

I'm definitely a swooper, but if you want my advice, find out which one you are, and practice in that knowledge. The process is really what you make of it, just have fun with it, and if you write shit, learn from the input, and move on to either fix it, come back to it later, or move on to greener pastures entirely.

---

rumetzen

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-792，蛋壳，一块故事}

点击展开rumetzen的感想和自评

George R R Martin said there are two types of writers: Architects, who carefully plan stories before beginning, and Gardeners, who just write and see how the story grows as they go along. I fall firmly into the latter category. For me, the joy of writing has always come from wild, spontaneous creation that comes in the middle of a story, and you lose a lot of that when you over-plan. Plotting out stories has always been tedious for me, and I struggle to actually write things once I've planned them out. Often, I'll start a story with absolutely no idea where it's going to end up. My story Eggshells, from the Wanderers' Library is a prime example of this. I started with only the first sentence as a guide, and wrote the rest over about an hour during a slow class day. The twist at the end didn't occur to me until I was about 3/4s of the way through, so I had to go back and re-write around it. Something similar happened with A Loaf Story. I had the premise, but no ending, something I realized when I got to the third act and stalled out. After a couple hours trying to think of a solution, I just started writing without actually knowing what I was going to do, and the result was my most “acclaimed” work to date.

You're most creative when you write yourself into corners. Those moments, like when I was writing SCP-792, when you realize something is desperately wrong with your story and you have to fix it. In this case, I had no motivation for farming the bodies, and I doubt I could have come up with something as good as I did if I had pre-planned it. It's the same principle as constrained writing. By placing limitations on yourself (working with what you've already written), you force yourself to be more creative. Of course, this can hurt you. I've lost count of the amount of times I've had to scrap vast portions of a story because I wrote myself into a situation I couldn't get out of, or turned the plot into a directionless muddle. When it works, though, it works better than anything I could sit down and plan out. (Note: I've found writing while sleep deprived works well under a similar principle, but for health reasons I can't recommend it.)

Theme usually isn't something I think about while writing, but an overarching idea you see in most of the stuff I write is "bittersweetness", if that can even be called an overarching idea. Life doesn't really have happy endings, and it doesn't really have sad endings. In fact, it doesn't really have definitive endings at all. So a lot of the times you'll see that in my work, mixing optimism with pessimism and making it clear that there's still more story to be told.

My on-site writing isn't guided by any one idea or principal. I'm probably one of the few people on this page who doesn't have some sort of overriding concept of the Foundation that they focus on in their writing, or at least some sort of canon they explore. I'm not a super deep thinker, and tend to take things and face value. I love the objects and stories they tell, but nothing about the setting inspires me to explore it deeper. I don't even have any “headcanon” on what amnestics are or how D-Class are handled. Maybe that ties into what I said earlier about not planning.

***

成员

Anborough

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1838，SCP-1428，O5指南}

点击展开Doctor Anborough的感想和自评

项目编号：SCP-XXXX
项目等级： Keter
特殊收容措施：
描述：
附录[XXXX-001]：

This might be what you think my SCP article template looks like and…you'd probably be right. However, the point is what I do from there. Everyone here is writing on a template of sorts, the only thing that matters is how you build on it.

I build my articles in a rather strange fashion, you could say. While most people say you should form an idea, then create an object to suit it, I don't, and I don't know anyone else that uses my formula (successfully). I form the object and its effect, then write the story, then edit the object as needed to fit the story. This has resulted in numerous hiccups for my article writing (mostly due to forced effects), and it is not easy to work with. This is also why I have so many Keter class objects (IE, Keter catering truck).

That doesn't mean I don't have anything useful or interesting to share, even with my awkward process. There are advantages to writing in this manner, and I will outline a few. One, it gives you focus. If you establish the object, it sets parameters for the story and challenges you to improvise and innovate. Sometimes people can get lost with so many possibilities, but when you establish parameters like this, it can be very useful in corralling your ingenuity. Secondly, it establishes the atmosphere. Once you have the general feel to your article, you can figure out how you want it to read emotionally. Then, you can throw in elements to intensify the mood or cause mood whiplash. Third, it lets you set up the twist/hook more effectively. You know what the object is, and you can figure out how to create contrast or surprise.

Now, I'm not telling you that you should change your own creative process (in fact I don't recommend that you should do things entirely my way, it's a pain in the ass), but if the parameter method I mentioned helps you, please use it. I've never written an essay like this before, so I apologize if it doesn't help or is too vague. If you can't find an idea to set your parameters, don't worry about it. The ideas will come to you as you go about your daily routine. Consider your experiences, and highlight the ones that provoked a reaction in you; those experiences will become ideas that survive.

Apparently I'm supposed to mention three of my works that best express my creative process. The three I'd have to pick out are SCP-1838 (Bob), SCP-1428 (Jinwu), and The O5 Orientation. Bob, as I said earlier, literally started as the idea "Keter catering truck," and Jinwu was "make the three-legged crow into an SCP object." The O5 Orientation, noticeably, is a tale, though it works because I started out with this premise: "a proposal in which there is no SCP-001." The story about Brian and the orientation factor itself all came about later. Granted, it didn't become a proposal, but I think that being the O5 Orientation makes it somewhat more unique.

Well, that's all I have to say, so good luck with your writing endeavors.

---

Crayne

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1118，SCP-1130，SCP-1142}

点击展开Crayne的感想和自评

My writing almost always begins with a mental image. I'll be minding my own business and all of a sudden my brain flips me the bird and makes me think about some sweaty, drunk guy, sitting in the dark in front of his blaring television while he slowly and absent-mindedly rips strips of loose skin from his flesh. Yeah, thanks brain, you total douche.

Anyway, I tend to ruminate on these visuals and the concepts behind them for a while, prodding them with my stick-o-logic until I've closed the major plot holes. Only then do I begin writing. The act of writing solidifies something for me, making it hard to just brainstorm about it. It's kind of like putting down the foundation of your new house. You can add more floorspace afterwards, but it'll be a hassle. And I suck at DIY stuff. I also suck at similes, obviously.

As I write, I usually hit a few more pesky logical problems that hid just out of sight, and I will typically spend weeks or even months reworking, and polishing articles until I feel they're ready to be published. This time of course includes editing according to feedback requested from specific authors at various stages of the draft. I only once coldposted and it got me my first and only deletion, teaching me a very important lesson: "If it's George W. fucking Bush, just say so instead of using a dumb-ass [REDACTED]."⁴ A wisdom for the ages, surely.

A few specific things I think bear mentioning:

1. Expungement: I am not friends with expungement. In fact, I would go so far to say that expungement is a total bitch and was probably the one who poisoned my cat. Anyway, my point is that good expungement is hard to do and really takes a lot of practice. But the biggest thing I see going wrong with expungement is the strange notion alive in the community, especially among new users/authors, that every article needs expungement. It doesn't. Not if it doesn't add anything.

Now, lately I haven't gotten any real flak over expungement in my articles, which I'll take as a good sign. The following is advice based on my own interpretation of the difference between [REDACTED] and [DATA EXPUNGED]. It doesn't directly contradict anything in Eskobar's excellent guide, but it takes another angle than the whole '[REDACTED] means withheld, [DATA EXPUNGED] means deleted' school of thought. Caveat emptor and all that.

When thinking about expunging something (which I'll use as a blanket term to mean both [REDACTED] and [DATA EXPUNGED]), ask yourself the following questions:

1. If I wrote this out without expungement, what would it be?
2. Is what I answered to 1. more effective/scary/touching/etc. than a [DATA EXPUNGED] or [REDACTED]?
   • If yes, don't expunge. Just write it out.
   • If no, move to 3.
3. Is it predictable?
   • If yes, don't expunge. In fact, rethink putting it in at all, but if you do, just write it out.
   • If no, move to 4.
4. Can you replace the expungement with one or maybe a few words and the text will flow well again?
   • If yes, use [REDACTED] -> I had a [REDACTED] time eating those bananas.⁵
   • If no, use [DATA EXPUNGED] -> I had a [DATA EXPUNGED] damn those monkeys to hell.

This way, [REDACTED] comes across as something small you don't need to or aren't permitted to know, and [DATA EXPUNGED] looks like someone's ripped parts of the text out because if you knew, they'd have to kill you.

2. Research: do it, even if you're just using Wikipedia. Don't feel that, just because you've dealt with a cold, you know all about viruses. Research and then research some more. Identify the stuff in your concept or draft that might raise eyebrows and read up on it. And if you have questions you can't find the answers to, ask around in IRC, on the forum, or contact one of our resident experts for help. It'll pay off when you don't get downvoted to hell because you made shit up on the spot.⁶

3. Confidence and the limits thereof: Believe in your own work, but never lose sight of the fact that your latest concept might in fact be complete and total shit for reasons you simply can't comprehend yet. It happens, we've all thought up turds. When experienced authors tell you to give up on an idea, you're free to ignore them, but there's always a reason why they'd tell you that.

And now I get to talk about three of my articles/tales. Yay!

SCP-1118 - Os Sumum
"Remember that stuff about George W. Bush? That started with a visual of a typewriter with molars for keys. When I started working on that, I remembered Bush's mispronunciation of 'nuclear' and went with the concept of a typewriter that retroactively let you put words in Bush's mouth. The idea of course being that any spelling errors made on the thing would cause mispronunciations like that one. Anyway, long story short: compulsion + temporal fuckery + awful redaction = downvote-a-thon. It got deleted and I stripped the concept bare, got rid of compulsions and temporal effects, and started thinking about how I could make this work. The answer was actually quite simple: something like this would probably be used for political motives. From there I spun a story about an Ahnenerbe artifact snapped up by GRU-P operating under Red Army jurisdiction after the fall of Berlin, and a botched manipulation of President Truman in the fifties. It's not one my highest-rated articles, but one that I am proud of, not in the least because it earned the blessing of GRU-P's creator as a good characterization of the GOI he had in mind."

SCP-1130 - A Handy Shortcut
"Another one that's not that highly-rated, but I'm proud of. It started with a visual of an abandoned hospital ward. I started thinking about how it would be to walk around in that, and then I remember thinking 'Wouldn't it suck if you had to in order to get somewhere?'

From there the step to a great big NO FCK U from your local Google Maps clone wasn't a big one. I added the deal with the devil (you get there really fast, but fuck do you need to slog through some awful shit), and the sound following you around in there, and hey, another article. I still consider this one to be my one and only scary article on the wiki."

SCP-1142 - A Cry for Help
"This one got its start when I imagined a portal underneath the sea, barfing up an endless stream of Nazi troop vehicles and staff cars as the Third Reich attempted to flee their dimension using gating technology. They miscalculated and…well. Anyway, that quickly hit a dead end, so I experimented with a portal appearing in some seedy motel room somewhere along a US highway. That didn't quite work either, so for the longest time I had no clue where to go with it.

And then I started wondering if I could potentially make you feel sorry for someone you really shouldn't feel sorry for. I ditched the idea of Panzerkampfwagens and Mercedes staff cars rumbling through a portal and I went for an ordnance item I've always been fascinated by: the Goliath tracked mine. Basically a remote-controlled miniature tank filled with explosives, for rolling under vehicles and well, you know. Anyway, I imagined it containing a specially modified receiver to be able to pick up signals from the other reality where things went horribly wrong for the Third Reich after they'd tried to stave off defeat by appealing to forces they shouldn't have ever wanted to know about in the first place. The power of the article is in the transcriptions, but also in the fact that not only do we not want to do anything for these people trying to reach us, we can't. We're basically listening to an entire world experiencing a massive K-Class scenario and waiting for it all to end.

---

Cryogenchaos

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-445，SCP-000，Lessons}

点击展开Cryogenchaos的感想和自评

The vast majority of my writing is less me coming up with something from scratch and more me spitballing something that someone else has said. A great deal of my own “comment tales” are perhaps the clearest example of this in practice, where I build miniature tales out of interesting things other users have posted on the forums. While I could just end this there and say “Go look at those to get a feel for how I write,” I think it’s prudent for me to try and reference some of my longer, more feature-length articles/tales on the site.

When talking about writing for the site, I suppose it is important to start with my very first successful article, SCP-445. SCP-445 was the result of a desperate struggle from a new SCP writer to come up with something worthwhile to the site. Through the tutelage of Dr Gears, I found myself learning how to create something from nothing, building off the simplest concept of “paper cuts suck” into what became SCP-445. It is here I believe where my writing niche, the creating worlds from the tiniest ideas, became apparent. The tone of the article is, and I will freely admit this, somewhat mediocre, and I do understand that the historical significance of 445 is less on its own merits and more on the silly name I gave to its manufacturer, but 445 helped me learn elements of writing that before then I had simply ignored or was genuinely unaware of. In essence, SCP-445 was the true beginning of my “career” as a writer.

SCP-000 is currently my highest rated tale, and I would like to believe that it is in some small part due to the massive amount of effort I put into the story. All jokes of it being “short and a play on proper articles” aside, the main story of SCP-000 is my tribute, my attempt to write like Lovecraft, to see if I could do existential horror without having ever done it before. Of course, my main writing style was still intact; the overarching idea was “what does the SCP-000 slot of the database actually look like”, and I am positive a large part of its success was due to the story itself being “hidden”, but 000 was my attempt at horror, at the kind of cloying fear of emptiness that so many horror writers have used very effectively. Did I succeed? I can’t honestly say for sure, but 000 taught me a lot about at least semi-serious horror writing.

My least highly regarded tale, Lessons, is actually quite near and dear to my heart, as it is my personal labor of love in the form of a “take THAT!” directed at my past. I see why it is not as beloved as my other tales: it’s simpler, there’s not a lot of action, and the ending is appallingly sudden and anticlimactic. However, when writing this tale, I found myself reflecting more and more on my growth as a writer, and how before I would hang my head in shame at the mere thought of the “Animal Talker” that was the culmination of all my writing missteps and pitfalls, now I could approach with a smile and say “Yes, this was terrible, wasn’t it?” Lessons was my final step with reconciling my past.

These three examples I feel speak to everything I have learned from my years of writing, something I hope other people can draw inspiration from. SCP-445 showed me that starting simple is sometimes the best way to conceptualize a story, while SCP-000 is what I feel can be accomplished when doing so. Lessons became the tangential lesson (heh) to this, to never be afraid of the past and to be able to look at it and accept your failings as part of your success. These two thoughts are thoughts I want all new members to see and hopefully learn when they start on this site, because these two ideas helped me grow into the writer I am today. And if it worked for me, well, maybe it can work for them, too.

---

djkaktus

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1864，SCP-2120，SCP-2464}

点击展开djkaktus的感想和自评

I would love to sit here and say that most of my ideas come from moments of divine inspiration, or deep insight of some form or another. I would love to say that, but the fact of the matter is most of my ideas start out as stupid, passing thoughts. Little things that I see, things I hear, usually in passing, that just don't seem to let go. Stuff that sits around and needles into the brain, and holds on like a bad cold. It isn't all like that, though. Some of my favorite (and most successful) articles are those that came in a flash, were written up with little thought, and thrown at the wiki to see if it would stick. The ones that hang around, though, are the ones I'm going to discuss in this section.

When I approach an idea, I try to categorize it with one of three questions. Is it scary? Is it weird? Is it funny? No doubt that an idea could be all of those things or none of them, but for the majority of writing I do for the wiki, those three categories are applicable. With a basic premise in mind, I then start to elaborate on themes. Where do I want to go? Do I start with the ending and work backwards? Is there a significant idea that I want to put in the foreground of the piece, or do I want to hide it for the reader to find? What about characterization? Is dialogue going to be important? Where's the hook?

And so on and so forth. The idea here is to find your center, in this case the flash of inspiration from the first paragraph, and let it grow in the mind. Let it take shape, grow and twist, and don't be afraid to fertilize that son of a bitch. Give it room to flourish. If you find things you don't like, trim them off. The worst thing you can do, in my opinion, is get so caught up in an idea that you're unwilling to let it go. If it becomes obvious that your bushes have got the plague, then you need to trim those bushes. Keep playing with the ideas in your head until you've got something workable, and then see how it looks on a page.

Lastly, consider your imagery. One of the most powerful tools we have as writers is the ability to evoke a scene in the minds of the reader. I use a lot of symbolic imagery, and highlight it in ways that draw the attention, like the little girls from 2464, the prehistoric buzzard-god in 1160, the little ghosts from 2125, or the victims of experimentation in 1994. To put it more eloquently that it probably needs, we are artists of the mind. Our words are our brushes, and the insight of the reader is our canvas. Don't neglect these things.

So, given what I've just said, let me walk you, dear reader, through some thoughts and inspirations I had while working on three of my favorite articles. Notably, they each fit one of the three different overall themes I was talking about earlier, and I'll list them as such.

1.) Humor: SCP-2120 - Damage Control
This was actually originally supposed to be a creepy story about a real world Davy Jones' Locker, with some sort of deep sea spectral fellow and dead people on ships. Eventually, the idea split off into two different articles, this one and 1864. I'm pretty pleased with that, all things considered.

I think it was Jekeled who first mentioned that the idea of ships "unsinking" could be cool, and I sort of ran with it from there. Throughout almost the entire course of its development, it was supposed to be a serious article about anomalous ocean crafts arising from the bottom of the sea. After a certain point, though, I started writing the dialogue at the end and couldn't help but be goofy with the whole thing. If you take away the last couple of logs, the entire article is sort of off-setting (in my opinion), with a number of unanswered questions and weird feelings. The contrast between the beginning of the article, and the notes at the end, make this particularly funny for me.

But that's just me.

2.) Weird: SCP-2464 - Suspension

This is the only article I've written that is legit based off of a dream I had. I know a lot of people attempt to turn their dreams into SCPs with various levels of success, but the problem is that most of the feelings in a dream are very user specific, and a lot of people have a hard time relating that outside of the dreamspace. The stories/articles end up feeling really disconnected, since a lot of the context is missing.

With this in mind, I decided to work with the imagery, and try to keep the details of the dream itself out of it. Using only the imagery, I worked with a new story, using characters I can sympathize with and ideas that interest me. When it was all said and done, the entire package was one that I was thoroughly pleased with; the right air of mysticism, the tension of something going on just below the surface, and plenty of Foundation mumbo jumbo.

3.) Spooky: SCP-1864 - The Lonely Liar

This was the other half of the Davy Jones article from 2120, and was basically a collection of loose ideas that stuck around for a bit. The core facet of the article, from an imagery standpoint, is the pool at the center of the labyrinth, the grate at the bottom, and the little boy curled in the corner. These are the foundation on which the remainder of the story is built; the scientists, the anomaly, the fishing ship and Pan Hun, and the cold night that he turned them all into monsters.

There really isn't much else to say about this than these are all ideas that scare me, and that's why I wrote it that way. The cold frozen island, the terror-child, the shrieking abominations, the doctor quietly singing eternity away in German. The mood it sets is the perfect kind of ambiance, and accomplishes exactly what I was trying to do: freak the fuck out of myself the reader.

---

Djoric

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1867，Three Sleepless Nights，SCP-2085}

点击展开Djoric的感想和自评

Generally, the first thing I start with when building an article is the core image or concept that is simple and memorable. Something to grab the reader’s attention right out of the gate, whether it’s through the idea itself, or the imagery I use. Weird stuff works really well here.

Ideas just sort of pop into my head. I might be inspired by a picture, or a string of words, or just the ramblings of my own mind. Whatever the case, I’ll end up thinking of things and going “oh, that should be a scip”. Now, this doesn’t always work to my advantage, given that I tend to think of the idea first and try to fit it into the format later.

I’m not a big fan of interface trickery or lede burying: what you see is what you get, doubly so for ridiculous prospects. Horror is secondary, as is expungement. Once the hook is cast, then it’s a simple task of fleshing it out. I write articles with the outlook that the contents are a facets of a functioning universe, not just random entries in an encyclopedia.

Now, my tales are generally worldbuilding or character pieces, and as time’s gone on they’ve amalgamated into a sort of Djoric-over-verse. I prefer the freedom of tales to the format of articles (Though I’m not fond of the lack of tale readership), and I really like seeing how I can make different facets of the Foundation universe fit together into a coherent whole. That, and I just like doing my own thing (for better or worse). The Foundation itself doesn’t strike me as all that interesting of a subject to be honest: I’m here for the setting as a whole, not just for the Foundation.

Examples:

SCP-1867 – This one was just one of those ideas that starts with a whim and practically writes itself. I had heard that the man who changed his name to “Led Zeppelin 2” had died, and saw that his original last name was “Blackburn”. This was mis-remembered as “Blackwood”, which sounded terribly posh and gentlemanly. Can’t remember where the slug part came from, to be honest.

End of the day: odd idea + good characterization + potential for tales = good scip o’ mine.

Three Sleepless Nights – This tale was basically born out of a desire to do something really different. An excuse to step outside the boundaries of typical Foundation operations and throw in psychics and wizards and all the rest, but without neglecting characterization or making everything stupidly over the top. It’s also the first appearance of the Leviathans, which crop up later in my other mythos pieces. Hits all the bases of what I aim for with tales.

SCP-2085 – I’ll be honest: this was solely an exercise in how much I could get away with. Loads of characterization in a scip, ridiculous premise, anti-Foundation message, the whole deal. And I got away with it too, meddling kids be damned.

BONUS TIME: The Et Tam Deum Petivi canon gets honorable mention as a whole, because…well, you put six months of heart and soul into something and you tend to be fond of it. I consider it some of my best work, just because it was one of those perfect storms where things just worked. I set out to tell a story about ordinary people trying to do the best they can in life, and I think I succeeded.

---

DrBerggren

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1728，SCP-1926，SCP-5040-J}

点击展开DrBerggren的感想和自评

I have too many ideas. My brain is like the SCP-871 of ideas. Just getting that out there, first off. Like a combustion reaction, my creative process starts with fuel, and then it explodes to help a bunch of meat make a metal box move faster. The fuel can be anything; from a book I read as a very young childerkin, to an absolutely terrible pun, to an interesting scientific concept. My very first SCP, SCP-1814, was inspired by a ranting Youtube comment, and it has been highly successful even though I'm pretty sure I coldposted it (NEW WRITERS PLEASE DON'T DO THIS). I also have extremely vivid, though not lucid, dreams. Now that I've been writing for the Foundation for almost two years, I've started to dream up a few new SCPs too. SCPs I dreamed up include SCP-1126 and SCP-1493.

Equal to having an organized physical workspace, sandbox use is important. For me, it can make or break the process of writing an SCP. I keep a highly organized system of sorting and managing new ideas for SCPs. There's a list of all the SCP and Tale premises I have ever thought up, which I cull infrequently to breed for usable ideas. I have a document for scraps — excerpts and sentences which are often used as inspiration rather than directly. I have a document for fresh new drafts, and a document for rejected drafts that I might come back to later. And I have a document pertaining to my own headcanons, just to keep myself consistent, since consistency is one of my biggest issues.

I can get inspiration from almost anywhere because I keep an open mind. I search for things that aren't quite like other similar things — broken, offbeat, crooked, discolored, et cetera. I have a good knowledge base because I read about equal amounts of fiction and non-fiction. Occasionally an SCP starts as just the title and I work from there. Choosing a good object number that rolls off the tongue helps, as does trying to never misspell anything. And I'm not afraid to ask for help if I need it, especially from people who have specific knowledge in specific fields of study.

From my own private stock, I personally recommend SCP-1728, SCP-1926, SCP-5040-J.

---

Eskobar

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1893，SCP-1085，注视}

点击展开Eskobar的感想和自评

There are basically two ways that I come to SCPs: either take personal experience and add anomalousness to it, or take an anomalous concept and add personal experience to it. I consider those to be the most important components of writing an SCP, for a couple of reasons. First, people will always know when you're full of shit, even if they don't know anything about whatever you're talking about. You have to have authority to speak with authority. Second, it will help to make the SCP more personal for you; you can put yourself in the position of "if this situation I encounter frequently in real life suddenly went batshit insane, what would I do?" and from there, you can build into "what would the Foundation do?" That's the entire basis of Alexylva University; I was working in a childcare/educational context with small children, and had lots and lots of time to think "I swear to god, kid, I wish I had a gun that would make you just sit down and shut up and DO WHAT I SAY!" "Look, punk, you're just gonna grow up to be a truck driver anyway. I wish I could just stick you in a box that would just get it over with already."

SCP-1893 — The Minotaur's Tale

"I'm going to defend format screws to the end of time. This uses about three or four format screws in one; it's a Tale masquerading as an SCP, it's five Tales masquerading as one Tale, it's weird Wikidot programming masquerading as an actual article. And it works for what it's supposed to do. I'll never claim it's the best article ever written, I'll never pretend it's for everybody. But every day, someone reads through that article, and at least one person has a little jump scare moment. And I tricked people into reading a Tale that I crammed onto the mainlist like two AA batteries where a 9V should clearly be. Neener neener, I say, neener neener."

SCP-1085 — Pound off the Pounds!

"I was in a miserable relationship and we had decided to start losing weight together. We were using these Jillian Michaels DVDs that she made after getting all famous from the Biggest Loser. There is almost no deviation from my experience and this SCP except the part where you die at the end. This is an example of applying personal experience that worked really well because it's a commonly recognizable combination (working out is hard! you know what else is hard? DEEEEEAAAAAATH) being fleshed out with details from my experiences. The hardest part of writing this article was typing the whole thing out on my Kindle, and it has over a hundred upvotes."

Stare

"One of my favorite Alexylva tales, and the highest rated such to date. When Tale-writing, one of the most important components is to make sure there is a story to be told, and then decide how the reader is actually going to encounter it. I present a massive backstory through showing without any real telling; other than the caps lock, the conversation could be taking place between any two employees around any worksite."

---

Faminepulse

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1782，SCP-1682，SCP-2682}

点击展开Faminepulse的感想和自评

The most important thing for me when writing an object documentation is to have an interesting premise, and interesting implications behind it. I don't begin writing until I'm sure what I have is something original or, I can explore something contrived in an interesting way. Only cover old ground if you are confident you can do it better.

I think narratives and hooks are only aesthetic in SCP articles after you're finished arranging the core concept. I think that the more you have to focus on pacing (and worse, making your skip more narrative than documentary) it's a sign of a weak concept.

Once you have your foundation in place the reader should be able to fill in the rest for themselves. Rarely will that result in a negative response unless you've left it so open-ended that the core concept itself becomes convoluted, because half of it becomes their own creation. There are lots of articles on the wiki that are interpreted completely different due to a popular headcanon.

How do you come up with an interesting idea? I don't suggest you go searching for them. Wait for them to come to you; go walking, go to work, sleep, listen to music, talk to people, practice your hobby - don't think about writing a skip. When the idea assembles itself in your mind you'll know whether or not it's good, and most of the time your individual perspective should be more than enough to make it interesting. All you have to get past after that are the god damn containment procedures.

SCP-1682 - Solar Parasite

A large thing on the sun that is not implicitly harmful. The article relies on the reader's curiosity. This is a good example of the power of letting the reader fill in the blanks, and the pitfalls of saying too much. Read this and ask yourself whether or not it would be better without the note explaining exactly what it is. How would you balance this article more effectively?

SCP-1782 - Tabula Rasa

In this article I try to convey a night terror I had to other people. The narrative itself is bad, as convoluted and purple as most dreams, but beneath it there is a solid underlying concept, and behind that is an interesting implication. This is not to say that you should write a sloppy skip because you have a really good hook, but having the hook helps.

SCP-2682 - The Blind Idiot

Asimov already did this, and Lovecraft before him, the only difference is the angle I wrote the concept from. You don't have to do much to make a stale idea refreshing. Take any idea from literature or popular culture and answer the questions they left you asking.

---

HammerMaiden

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-400，SCP-2000，SCP-1780}

HammerMaiden的感想和自评

Basically, all of my writing starts out with a half-developed hunch. It's one of the reasons I'm generally pretty good at writing from a prompt. I'll take an experience, a cool gadget, an off-hand remark someone has made and turn it into a "what if". Sometimes it runs deeper, and often the deeper the initial concept goes, the more I get to write about it. One of the things that helps me do that is to talk to other people about the idea as I'm developing it. It helps me pick up on blind alleys, just by imagining the reactions a hypothetical reader would have to a certain plot twist or story device. It's a good early warning system and helps me save a lot of time.

So let's see how this is reflected in one of my best, SCP-400. We start with Soulless's very own challenge, two dice rolls for words "Exanimate" and "Protection". For a long time I was stuck on the most obvious solutions to these problems. Armor that causes Zombies. Dead dog guarding his house. Nothing really interesting was coming to mind. I had to keep wiping clean before I even started. Then, when talking myself through it, I reframed the prompt: "Let's say I had to protect something that was already dead…" From there, it practically wrote itself. The details are just details; much of it could be changed without losing the sensation of protecting something which is already gone.

A much simpler example is SCP-2000, my winning contest entry. From the concept of "If the Document Recovered from the Marianas Trench was canon, what would the Foundation need to pull it off?" the rest of the thing fell into place. You need to protect against reality bends. You need construction equipment and seed banks. You need cloning technology. And something this far-reaching necessarily affects plenty of other skips and many of the influential staffers. One after another the dominoes fall naturally out of the singular premise.

There's another element to my writing style which attempting to write this paragraph for the first time helped me discover just now. Much of what I try to do is the result of the question "Why can't I?" When I first joined in February 2013, it was really rare to find good character work on the site (it still sort of is, in my opinion). Most of the tales involving important people in the Foundation were about the big names like Clef, Konny, Bright, and Gears. A lot of work was done with these characters, indeed so much that I didn't feel there was room for a fledgling author to add to the body of work. It was also taboo at the time (and still sort of is, in my opinion) to attempt to make a new character for yourself.

"Why can't I?" "Because so much has already been done." "Well, what hasn't been done, then?"

So I went and found an underexplored niche that I knew I could do well: Temporal Anomalies. And although the narrative focuses on Dr. Thaddeus Xyank, I eventually decided that we needed a whole department. I've been building the details ever since, and as a result of opening the door to time travel, the story of the Temporal Anomalies department can be ported into any other plot-line on the site. Provided, of course, that it can be made to fit without compromising the internal logic of either narrative.

The moral of the story is, you can do anything you want as long as it's good. You'll know you're good when, apart from the tiny tweaks and critiques offered by your peers (and sometimes a good hard slap in the mouth by someone who has a very different point of view) your project begins to write itself. The details must flow naturally from the premise. The characters must behave as though they're real thinking beings with real motivations. The plot must build upon itself according to its own internal logic.

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Ihpkmn

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：S&C塑料公司的万圣节，SCP-1658，古老传说}

点击展开Ihpkmn的感想和自评

Ideas and Writing:
How do I develop ideas? I do various things to help the process along. I read other SCPs and tales, and just read a lot in general. I spend an obscene amount of time online. When I can, I watch shitty paranormal shows on places that used to be reputable such as the Discovery Channel to get ideas. Unless I'm writing for something like S & C Plastics, I don't try to do anything fancy like make big, interconnected storylines in my SCPs; I keep my ideas simple and self-contained.

As for how I write… well, just look at my talebox and that should tell you a whole damn lot. Typically, I write in a linear fashion, beginning-to-end, but sometimes I skip around parts that I don't know what to do with yet. Here's some advice: figure out your ending before you start writing the damn thing. It will save you a lot of grief. I do not like writing overly-serious tales, but I do write SCPs as clinically as everyone else on the site does. I do try to inject some semblance of character into my tales, and I take the advice of someone I respect greatly; he told me, essentially, that writing good characters isn't as hard as we think it is. Characterization is all in the head of a reader, and the actions of a character can mean different things to different readers. (I don't have the actual phrasing of what he told me anymore, sadly, but it's helped me write good stuff). I write several things at a time, going between projects and occasionally putting one on chat or the forums. I don't try to push out a lot of tales at one time, and when I do post them, I like them to be timely; I have one tale sitting on my sandbox that takes place in February that I haven't posted because I couldn't think of an ending in time. Maybe next year.

The Three Pieces:
I've been asked to talk about three pieces that I've written for the site. So, I'm going to talk about three things in no particular order: My first S & C Plastics tale, Halloween at S&C Plastics; my highest-rated SCP, SCP-1658, and Local Legends, my personal favorite tale.

Firstly, Halloween at S & C Plastics. This was written for the 2012 Halloween Contest. Djoric had announced his idea for S & C Plastics not even a week earlier, so I thought to myself it would be a good way to get the idea out there, as well as maybe be a good setting for my tale. We knew almost nothing about this setting as of yet, apart from the fact that it had the capacity to cross into other universes and was set in a place where weirdness was normal, a setting that Djoric compared to Gravity Falls. I was a giant fan of the show at the time (and still am), so I drew upon the weirdness of Gravity Falls to write the tale, in which a sentient roll of toilet paper surrounded by a halo of eggs vandalized Site 87 in Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin⁷ for not decorating for that wonderful holiday we call All Hallows Eve, and how the site reacted to it. It was a nice little slice-of-life thing that I had written in two hours… and it ended up getting second place in the contest. This was the second tale I had ever written (The first one has since been deleted due to being an incredibly poor-quality Blackwood tale), and I was genuinely surprised how much people liked it. So I wrote more about S & C Plastics. And more. And even more. And now, I'm sitting on a mountain of tales about S & C Plastics. Are there more to come? There most certainly are.

Next, SCP-1658 was based off of a blurb I saw somewhere about something called "bio-glyphs" (I can't remember if it was on the site or in chat or where), essentially, a living language. I converted that into living writing and made it into a textual microbe, with an image from visual records (which was named textualmicrobe.jpg; credit where it's due). I got feedback, and people said it was bland… then I read an article on Cracked about what libraries do to books that get damaged: they burn them. Then I read something about mold, thought about what sort of microbes could be found on books… it all clicked pretty damn well. I added in the most famous book burning incident in history (that is to say, the Library of Alexandria) in the backstory, and soon, I had a cohesive narrative together.

Finally, Local Legends, another S & C Plastics tale, and my favorite that I've written. I'm sorry, but this canon is my favorite thing to write about on the entire dang site. This was intended to be the first part in a story arc involving the various Legends in the town, kind of an American Gods-style brawl between the older form of fear that was the Legends, and the newer form that was a creepypasta character (which doesn't exist, even on the internet) called the Paperboy. The Paperboy was a boy that was gruesomely disfigured by a bully who forced him down, made him eat superglue, and then superglued construction paper all over his body. He killed people who bullied others by slitting their necks with paper, and the storyline would have ended with the Foundation, the Legends, and the Paperboy (and possibly various other Creeps) fighting for the very soul of Sloth's Pit. For various reasons (mainly writers block and the fact that the Paperboy character didn't feel threatening), this never happened, but the Local Legends are characters that have a certain charm to them, in my opinion. So, I'm planning on using them in future tales, perhaps for a similarly-themed story arc.

Final Thoughts:
As of December 24th of 2013, I have been a member of the SCP Wiki for two years. And quite frankly? being able to join the wiki is one of the best Christmas Presents I've ever gotten. I've learned so much from writing here, met so many new, interesting people, and have just had a great time. This place has helped me through a few rough patches, and I'm glad that I'm in a place that's so great for developing new ideas and styles of writing. So, to all of those who are part of the wiki: thank you. To all of those who want to join the wiki, or have just recently joined: welcome, and I hope you enjoy your stay.

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Jekeled

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1798，SCP-1831，Deeper}

点击展开Jekeled的感想和自评

My creative process… honestly, it's a mess. Most of my ideas start with a germ of an idea - Morse code signals, a Wondertainment knockoff, what have you-that I have at random (and often incongruous) times. From there… well, that's when the fun begins.

I'm not one of those writers who plots out what's going to happen beforehand. I'm not even one of those writers who knows what's happening as he writes the story! Usually, I sketch out the rough story in my head, and continue to add bits and pieces to the picture that I have in my head. It's why some of my SCPs have a tendency to get so convoluted-I just keep adding stuff that sounds cool until I decide it's finished.

Some stuff on my SCPs/tales:
SCP-1798: This started from a single idea: what if a bunch of cars started communicating via Semaphore signals? The idea just kept expanding from there, as I added more and more and more ideas as they came to me. First the Morse code, then the people dropping the cars off, then the plane, and so on. The Boeing connection, incidentally enough, was entirely accidental. The first completed draft of this ended with the severed hand of a member of England's royal family being found in one of the cars, and that aspect was one of the most consistently derided parts of it. So I decided to replace it with another influential figure and, living in the Pacific Northwest, the figure of Boeing immediately sprang to mind. From there, the idea just took off!

SCP-1831: This started out with the idea of a cryogenic tea party filled with many different 1920s starlets who had preserved themselves for posterity. The first thing that caused the drastic shift away from that was the idea that the cryonics company was using Satanic rituals to dump heat into a cold Hell. The rest of the SCP just sprung from that idea.

Deeper: Writing this, I wanted to create a story that was truly left open to interpretation. It's short, but it's the kind of length that works-any longer or any shorter, and the carefully spun net of clues would fall apart into one interpretation or another.

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Kate McTiriss

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-2072，SCP-2558，迪克西兰爵士乐噩梦魔法}

点击展开Kate McTiriss的感想和自评

My writing process is highly unusual compared to most Foundation authors: I’ve written/recorded everything I’ve done for the site in one sitting, and coldposted it immediately after finishing it and rereading.

As I don’t think that’s a feasible style for most authors, I’m going to approach this by saying the thing I try to do that most authors, especially new ones, fall short on:

Deep Context, But Brief Articles - My SCPs and tales use words judiciously. I try and write the briefest overview that communicates the concept. But, here’s what you need to do to pull off that style: You need to have in your mind a deep story about your SCP. When you post it, you should be prepared to answer questions like,

• “How and why was this object created or first discovered?”
• “Where is this object? How does its location play a role in its effect and containment?”
• “Who recovered/contained this object for the Foundation, what were the challenges in it?”
• “What internal debates and controversy, if any, surround this object’s containment? What alternate containment procedures were suggested by Foundation researchers?”
• “What is the future of this object? What makes this file compelling and important for Foundation employees to read?”

You don’t have to put all of these answers in the article. But knowing them will mean you are an expert at this item and know how to best summarize it. You can hint at this thought by citing internal Foundation sources, documents and journals in the footnotes of your article. This makes your SCP exist as an organic part of a breathing world in your head, and can inspire you to write other objects and tales that fit in that world. That’s why all my work is set in the same continuity.

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Montala

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：何为伦理？，Welcome Aboard，Can't Catch A Break}

点击展开Montala的感想和自评

Usually the ideas I come up with come about fully formed…or they fully form themselves as I go. Usually, they start off as single line of dialogue or prose that I build the story around. For Welcome Aboard, it was the line with the penguins; for Ethical? it was the line I repeated a couple of times. This line wouldn't get out of my head, it just kept running around, absorbing me. So I created a character that could speak the line: a lawyer, for Welcome Aboard. When I started writing, the story just developed, formless at first, but quickly taking shape.For Ethical? I took a concept, the canon for which it is written, and decided I was going to write for it. For the longest time I had no clue what to write…before that line popped into my head and the story pulled itself from there. Can't Catch a Break was the same. I decided to do a UIU tale and the title stuck itself in my head. So the story built itself around the title.

The biggest thing I pay attention to while writing, aside from spelling and grammar, is my dialogue. Dialogue is one of the hardest things to write well, so I always try to make sure it sounds and flows as if it were natural speech. A good tip for that is to read it to yourself aloud. If you wouldn't say it like that, odds are they wouldn't either. Similarly, details on surroundings are important…but not so important as to take ten pages of adjectives. Give the reader enough to have a good picture of where they are and who they are, but don't bore them with the color of the pavement in the third floor of the parking garage in the 5700 block of New York City twenty feet from the…you get my point.

Lastly, and arguably most importantly, I try never to tell the story. I prefer to let the story tell itself. If the story is presenting itself to you, wanting to be told, let it be. Try not to force an ending that doesn't feel natural…let the story come to a conclusion that feels natural. If you have an army of 4000 men against one guy with a small army's worth of guns and ammo, he's not going to come back for the sequel. It wouldn't be the natural, non-contrived ending. It's a careful balancing act between creating the medium through which the story is told (characters, setting, plot) and letting the story go and tell itself.

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PeppersGhost

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-666½-J，SCP-1884，SCP-1715}

点击展开PeppersGhost的感想和自评

How To Write SCPs the PeppersGhost Way:

First, come up with the germ of an interesting idea, completely by accident. Next, let this idea incubate in the back of your mind (or sandbox) for however many days, weeks, or months it takes to grow into something resembling a fully-formed concept. Then continue to sit on it until the moment comes when you feel ready to buckle down and write the whole article in a single sitting. Toss the draft around the forums and chat, get less feedback than you'd hoped for, grow impatient, and then just go ahead and post the darn thing. Fix typos and other glaring errors as they're pointed out to you by commenters.

PROTIP: If you want to improve on my methods, you could even try to proofread your work before you post it!

Congratulations! You now know how to write SCPs the PeppersGhost way! Hope you know how to swim, 'cause you'll be diving Scrooge McDuck-style into an ocean of upvotes in no time!**

On a more serious note, I do tend to put a lot of forethought and planning into my articles. Before I begin writing, I need to be able to answer two questions: 1) What is the story I'm trying to tell? and 2) How am I going to tell it? Answering first question requires me to know what my concept is, and answering the second question requires a plan for how to execute it. When it comes to concept and execution, I have a natural tendency to focus too much on the former and neglect the latter, so I really have to force myself to make sure I have both elements working clearly and harmoniously in my mind before I begin writing. If I don't, my concept aren't communicated effectively, and the reader is left with nothing but a soggy page of word soup.

Pretty much all of my work involves a narrative element of some sort. I've yet to write an article that is completely supported by the idea alone and not expounded upon with addenda of some sort. Sometimes the narrative element is a backstory told in a very straightforward way. For example, in SCP-1884, Rezarta and Luana each use their interview logs to tell their life stories. At other times, I'll take a slightly less linear approach. If you look closely, you'll see that SCP-666½-J is two stories in one: a colorfully worded account of a bad bout of food poisoning I once had, and an over-the-top scenario in which half of Site-19 is afflicted with a similar condition. The core concept of SCP-666½-J's effects had been bouncing around in my head for a long while, but the article didn't really seem to 'click' until I came up with the idea to bookend the description with the incident at Site-19.

In some cases, the story is told through pieces of information that the reader is left to put together on their own. Over the course of my SCP-1715 article, you learn who he is, then you hear what he does, and then you finally get to "meet" him, so to speak, through the interview. I never actually state outright who or what he actually is, but you get a good enough idea of his personality and abilities that it's fairly easy to form a picture in your mind of what he might be. The article isn't a traditional "story" in the sense that it doesn't describe a series of linear events, but it still follows traditional storytelling dramatic structure.

DISCLAIMER*

I think that examining another person's creative process is a wonderful idea and a great way to find inspiration and grow as a creator. In virtually every creative field, beginners find their start by imitating the work of someone they admire. However, I feel it's important to note that there's a dangerous tendency for people to permanently latch onto copying a particular style at the expense of developing their own.

As an art student, I've seen plenty of people buy "How to Draw" books filled with step-by-step instructions for replicating the author's drawings. People who buy these books seem to be under the impression that imitating someone else's artwork will make them just as good as the original artist, but this is seldom ever the case. When you learn how to draw by copying a particular person's style, you're no longer creating a visual abstraction of reality. You're creating an abstraction of an abstraction. I've seen a lot of people who try their hardest to imitate the classic Disney or Manga styles, and some succeed to an extent, but they almost always have difficulty creating anything that feels fresh or original, and when they're required to work outside their carefully imitated 'style', the technical quality of their work plummets.

Take a look at nearly any legendary artist with a distinctive style–whether they may be a painter, newspaper cartoonist, Disney animator, or Manga author–and you'll find that they learned to draw by observing the world as it really is, not by imitating someone else's interpretation of what the world looks like. I believe that writing works the same way. If you try too hard to write in someone else's style, your proportions are going to look wonky, the expressions will seem cross-eyed, and everything will be out of perspective. Write from life, and when you can't do that, write from research. Both readers and art professors will be able to tell when you work is grounded in reality, instead of just reinterpretations of other people's ideas of what reality is.

That's not to say you can't learn a lot by studying someone else's work and processes. You can learn a great deal! Just make sure you're using their stuff as the drywall of your work, not the foundation.

DISCLAIMER**
Pools of upvotes not guaranteed; results may vary.

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Reject

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-419，SCP-1451，SCP-1231}

点击展开Reject的感想和自评

I'm always coming up with ideas, but I only write the very best ones. Unfortunately for readers of this article, my inspiration comes from all different places. The way I know how to settle on a concept though is if I don't forget about it within a week and still like it, then I know that it has potential (That's why I rarely respond to challenges. The best ideas are completely out of the blue and don't follow any sort of rigid rules). Then I work out the kinks of what I'm trying to say and then decide how to say it. Finally, I spend an absurd amount of time shopping it around and reworking it until everyone I've talked to has said it's good. One dissenting opinion can put my posting date back a week.

I don't take so long to post solely because I'm a perfectionist, however. I work in as many easter eggs and references as I can, and that can take ages. My ideal SCP is interesting enough for an upvote on a first read-through, and with the explanation becomes fantastic. My later SCPs have a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes than I will ever say in the article (or Discussion).

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Scantron

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-824，SCP-1902，SCP-1248}

点击展开Scantron的感想和自评

There's no one way that I consistently get my ideas. I find that talking with other people, reading everything you can get your hands on, and thinking about philosophy (I'm that kind of nerd) all get my creative juices flowing by providing some sort of mental stimulation. If an idea is good, I will never have any trouble thinking about it, exploring it, and turning it over in my mind — in fact, it'll happen even if I want to think about other things. If I don't want to think about a concept, then neither will the readers. I never write down my ideas, because if I need to do that to remember them, they probably aren't that captivating.

Even if I find myself thinking about something all of the time, that doesn't always translate into a written article. It's a matter of deliberately putting off the writing process until I am unable to not write it. Consciously going out of my way to write something results in about two paragraphs of material, tops, before I get burnt out. Much of what less experienced writers need to actively worry about and focus on, like tone, organization, and research, simply come naturally to me because of experience. Most of the mental work associated with writing goes into finding a balance between exploring all of the implications of an idea, hitting all the points of the narrative structure (theme, plot, that stuff), and keeping the story clear and free of distracting elements.

I feel like these works of mine are good models for different parts of my creative process:

• Basically every part of SCP-824 was put in as a logical extension of the existence of a carnivorous plant that, instead of being fast and snapping up animals, moves slowly and eats other plants.
• SCP-1902 was not a particularly complex or unique idea on its own. A lot of the more creative aspects were put in during the writing to deliberately twist the expectations of the "monster" and "released god" tropes, in order to balance out how terse the article would be otherwise.
• SCP-1248 was probably bouncing around in my head for the longest of any of my articles before becoming a final product. I'd been interested in the aspects of personality for a while before I hit upon a framework that made the idea click for me. The rest of the article involves drawing the idea out to interesting conclusions.

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Tagliafierro

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-1827，SCP-2703}

点击展开Tagliafierro的感想和自评

Whenever I write an SCP, I never think of the object/creature/phenomenon/Spice Girls first. The first things I think of, are the addenda. The addenda are usually where I put the hook, the story, or just the interesting part of the article. Most of the times, is something weird. But since I am here, it means that it must be the good kind of weird.

However, the addenda are not the first things I write. I just keep them in mind most of the time, even when I am not writing, so that I can shape them, define them and get rid of the eventual plotholes. We can say that addenda are the first things I think of when I wake up in the morning, but that wouldn't be true. It's breakfast. After I am done writing description and procedures, I am free to play with the addenda, without having to write in that cold, serious tone the Foundation has. My favourite kinds of addenda to write are the the testing logs, because they can tell a story with four sentences.

Now for the ideas, they are just the stuff I think of everyday, that happened to me, or stuff that I usually see in real life and on TV on daily basis. For example, SCP-2703 is just a girl trying to find love writing her number on bathroom stalls. Now, how many times have we seen those? When we go in a fast food for a break during a trip with our families and we see those numbers spamming the already dirty bathroom's walls. What I always wondered was: "Who writes this stuff?" "Don't they have anything else to do?" "Do they bring a black-felt pen everywhere they go?" "What if they get called when they are already having a date?" From these unanswered questions, sparkled an answered question: "What if an extra-dimensional creature saw one of these things, and decided to do the same?"

Another article I always loved was SCP-1827. It's actually my favourite, maybe because it was the first successful thing I wrote. The idea behind this one is kinda complex. The "Great Turkey" is actually a deity from a novel I am writing, and it is the creator of the Multi-Universe. I don't remember why it is a turkey. Anyway, I wanted to have the Great Turkey on the site, and so I asked myself another question, that I now ask myself everytime I write: "How can I make this weird but at the same time interesting?" So the idea that it was actually Herons from another word tricking the turkeys of our world that there was a turkey paradise, without realizing that our turkeys are far away from that level of intelligence. Yes.

In fine, the last questions I ask myself, like many other authors probably do, is: "Would I upvote it?"

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weizhong

^{推荐的故事/SCP文章：SCP-2800，对吧？，Leisure Time}

点击展开weizhong的感想和自评

My writing process generally starts with a feeling or idea in this jumbled scrap-heap that I call a brain, and ends with me attempting to communicate that feeling to the audience. When I write, my greatest difficulty lies in trying to express what I feel to the reader in a way that makes sense. In addition, things that interest me aren't necessarily the things that interest everyone in the audience. My personal triumphs in writing come from how accurately I portray what I'm feeling, and not necessarily how many upvotes something receives.

In my articles, I often start with some oddball idea that amuses/intrigues me. The next step is illustrating exactly why it does so, and how my audience should feel the same way as well.

SCP-2800 remains my favorite personal article for its success in conveying how I felt. The idea started off as an observation of the lack of cactus-related SCP's on the site (seriously), and then morphed into my inversion of the X-Man/superhero trope that's found all too often on this site by writing a superhero without the super. The idea that I tried to convey was that of a genuinely heroic hero who is saddled with his own ineptitude, a comedo-tragic protagonist of sorts. I originally deleted this article, and had to fix it specifically because I wasn't conveying my feelings properly, and had to work to make it better, which is something that all new writers should understand. There is absolutely nothing wrong with deleting an article to fix it.

My tales, on the other hand are an entirely different ball game. Each and every one of my tales started off with a distinct emotion, and nearly all of them examine perspectives and realities of living and working at the Foundation. In tales, I look for a personal connection to the audience, something that the cold and clinical tone of an article has a hard time doing effectively.

Leisure Time began with a feeling of bittersweetness. In this, I wanted to explore what it felt like to be a researcher, day in and day out, and what someone could do to cope with their existence as a professional torturer and jailer. Certainly, there is a high level of emotional stress, and I wanted to demonstrate how that felt, and how it made me feel. Tales are a great vehicle for doing so, and my goal was to write personable characters that someone could really get a feel for. While they have aspects of their personality that define them, they don't (and you should never allow your characters to do this) only be these caricatures, an issue that many people have in writing tales, and just fiction in general.

Right? began with the emotion of despair. I wanted to show the horror inherent in simply existing. D-class are a throwaway tool in so many articles, and it was fun to see how they must feel during testing. While D-class are generally the dregs of society, they still remain human, and humanity therefore means emotion. Another concept that I love in writing (drawn from reading far too much O. Henry) is a good old-fashioned twist. My advice on twists is that they have to be suitably surprising. I threw in a hint to a twist at the beginning, but my twist in and of itself was a left turn from what people expected, given that most of the main character's friends had died.

In sum, write how you feel. Whether it's a sense of wonder, regret, joy, love, etc, use your feelings to tell the audience a good story, and hopefully, they'll feel the same way too.

Footnotes

1. 译注：指因为沉浸于故事情节中而没有意识到的情节漏洞；而当观众意识到这个漏洞时，它也已经不再重要了。

2. 译注：主站聊天室频道。

3. 译注：当然现在已经发布了：new-kid-on-the-block。

4. Thanks, Smapti

5. No, that's not a good example of unpredictable expungement, I know. Humor me.

6. Making shit up is fine, but make sure you do it convincingly. For a good example of things that don't actually exist, but we don't care, see SCP-2000.

7. called Backwoods when the tale was written, eventually called Sloth's Pit after Djoric's idea to name it Sloth Spit.