Greetings, all! My name is AstersQuill, 19cord's resident queer deer, critter, and slice of life writer. Recently, I was asked in the writing channels about how I built my narratives, how I went from the idea stage to the draft stage. I sent a really rough outline of some of my works to the chat to help show that process, and I was encouraged to turn that into somewhat of a comprehensive guide on the topic. By the end of this essay, you should have a better idea of how to think about a concept, develop a story out from your idea, how to plan scenes, and even how to utilize an anomaly for the emotional core of your story.
Queerious' Commentary: Hey all! Queerious here, Aster invited me to work together on this, and I love talking about concept to final product, so I couldn't resist! I'm here to add thoughts and other frameworks that can help understand things more practically.
A disclaimer before we start, though: this essay is only for SCPs, and this is my process specifically. This essay focuses on SCPs because the format allows anomalies to be fully defined. While it will not explain the exact ways I approach tales, there is enough similarity between the two that you can apply lessons learned to any format. If this process doesn't work for you, or you have another process in mind that works better, I encourage you to leave a comment to let me know.
Part 1: What is an Anomaly?
An anomaly is the vessel through which you tell your story. At least, that's how I think about it.
When writing an SCP, the anomaly is the core of your piece; they are both the focus of the story, as well as being the catalyst for any events covered in the article.1 The beauty about anomalies, though, is that they can be whatever the story requires. They are incredibly fluid in appearance, and I find that my stories are more successful when they are bent and tweaked to reinforce the ideas and message that I am trying to convey.
Queerious' Commentary: I want to take a minute here to explain a framework for how to analyze your anomaly, and present it as a simple and easy to understand pitch, with examples. The way I break down an anomaly is to ask the following questions.
- Who is the anomaly?
- What does the anomaly do?
- Why?
And now, to explain the questions in more detail and show an example, we will be referencing SCP-682, our favorite murder monster.
Who?: This question asks what or who your anomaly is. This can be as simple as 'A Bunny' or as complex as 'The Abstract Concept of Dog Joy'. Don't try to overcomplicate things, this should be as simple and clear about what the anomaly was or looks like.
Example: 'A Lizard'
What?: This question asks you to explain what the anomalous effects are, but I want to encourage thinking about this in an abstract way. Rather than being focused on the exact mechanics behind something, instead focus on what we see as the reader. It should be a simple, clear and concise statement that tells us what we can expect from the article.
Example: 'It is incredibly hard to kill, potentially impossible'
Why?: This is the most important question within this framework. This is where you explain the mechanics or motivations behind the anomaly. The question is focused on what causes the anomalous effects to manifest, what causes things to change, or why the anomaly does what it does. Spend the most time on this question, as it is the jumping point for understanding how to make your anomaly an emotional core. This is also the most flexible, and easy to tweak without fully changing the concept of your anomaly.
Example: It hates all living things, so, The Foundation needs to destroy it.
With the example strung together, the framework analysis of SCP-682 reads:
Example: SCP-682 is a lizard that is incredibly hard to kill, potentially immortal. It hates all living things, so, The Foundation needs to destroy it.
Through this framework, you can get a stronger grip on your anomaly, and be able to get others to understand things easily.
For this essay, I am going to use SCP-6342 as an example, showing the process I took from concept to finished product, to help illustrate my points.
SCP-6342 was inspired by two things:
- A quest from Fallout 4's "Far Harbor" DLC (which I did not play personally);
- A running gag following a ttrpg game I ran over 2 years ago.
When I first wrote down the idea of SCP-6342 in my notes, all I wrote was "a crab that grows in size depending on how much fear someone has while looking at it." By itself, that seems like a very basic concept; there are a lot of fisherman tales about giant sea creatures and such, so adapting something like that into the SCP format seemed fairly easy. If we were to put it in the template above, it would look something like this:
- Who is the anomaly? The crab.
- What does the anomaly do? Grows in size without limitations
- Why? Depending on the amount of fear someone has while looking at it.
This isn't really a particularly interesting anomaly on its own at first glance, and the article wouldn't have survived if I just ran with that idea and did nothing else with it. A lot of starting authors can get caught up with feeling like they can't modify an idea; we think that changing and tweaking an anomaly is one of the best ways to add depth to your story. So, I didn't just run with that — from this point on, the most interesting aspect of ideation takes place.
Part 1 Main Takeaway: Your initial ideas don't have to be grand in scale, nor do they have to be "good." Ideas, like plants, need time and energy to grow, and it's important to expand on ideas instead of just giving up right away because it's not "good" or throwing a million ideas at the wall in an attempt to have one that is "good." A simple, clear, and easy-to-communicate idea is stronger than a complex, confusing one.
Part 2: Why do I Feel Things?
Once you have your concept, it's time to start expanding on it further. I typically like to connect the anomaly to an emotional concept; the anomaly being a metaphor for something. By using the anomalous as an exaggeration of a realistic situation or emotion, and tying it to tangible feelings or concepts, you can provide meaning and insights into something mundane that we, as the audience, all understand. The best advice I have for this is to focus less on "What can my anomaly do?" and more on "What does the anomaly mean?"
If you wanted to write about a hard-to-destroy reptile, you could focus less on why it is hard to destroy and more on what constant violence does to someone. Want to write a story about a murderous creature that kills you if you see its face? Why not focus more on why it doesn't want to be perceived in the first place rather than figuring out what impossible lengths it would go to kill someone. Besides SCP-682 and SCP-096, you can repeat this ad nauseum for most posted SCPs. Figuring out how to create a deeper meaning from a simple concept is an incredibly valuable skill to learn, and one that can also be a great tool for critique.
For SCP-6342, I could have taken this article several different directions: I could write about the adventures of a Foundation naval vessel, Moby Dick style, or maybe I could have created a more intimate horror story about exploring sunken ship. Truthfully, I usually work in the opposite direction, finding the emotional core of my work before creating my anomaly. In this case, I was in uncharted waters.2 Thinking about how my concept was already focused onto fear, I settled on what would be the emotional core of my story:
The crab is a metaphor for anxiety.
The feeling of fear, both that primal, animal-like feeling, and also the general anxiousness of the unknown, is one that (most) humans know well. By rooting my anomaly thematically with that emotion, I have a very basic framework from which to start writing my story from.
Queerious' Commentary: Jumping in here to bring up a point about 'Theme'. I think of a theme as the heart of your story, the conceptual focus. This doesn't mean that it only has to be about that topic, or explicitly focused as such, rather, the choices that you make during the writing process should reinforce or work towards that thematic meaning.
This is a non-comprehensive list of the many, many ways that theme can influence a work:
- Moral of the story
- What you want the reader to feel
- An issue the characters face
- Decisions the characters make
- The ending of your story
- How your story is framed
- etc.
So when thinking about your theme, don't let yourself be limited to it only applying to a bit of the story; let it infuse the entire work and it will feel more cohesive as a result.
Saying that 'the crab is a metaphor for anxiety' may seem basic, but when you are early in the creative ideation process, that level of detail is enough to start to plan out and start writing your story. So how do we go from here, to a finished work?
Part 2 Main Takeaway: Figure out the deeper "why" of your anomaly. The "why" doesn't need to be 100% emotional or connect to emotions, but you should try to expand your story on a deeper layer past the general idea of the anomaly. More often than not, the "why" is your theme.
Part 3: Are Outlines in?
Wait! Don't run screaming and crying, I know outlines are scary, but we will get through this together. When you really look at and break down what an outline needs to be, they're an incredibly useful tool.
An outline can be as detailed or as short as you like, and can exist in both a physical state, digital state or in your brain space. Once I have defined the anomaly, I outline a very basic shape of the story, so that I can get a sense of where things are going to go. For example, I often make an outline following this general format:
Beginning: This is where my story is beginning.
Scene X: This scene acts as the opener, and provides context to the reader about what the story will be about, who the story is about, and why the story is happening.
Scene Y: This scene acts to show progression of the story. The character finds more resources3 that push them towards the stories, we learn more about our character, and we begin to see the world change based on the actions of the character.
Scene Z: This scene acts as the climax and resolution of the piece. The character uses what they learned along the way to overcome some sort of obstacle. The state of the world is changed following this scene and, unless brought about by the story, cannot be brought back to what it once was.
End: This where I want my story to end.
Queerious' essay on Cascading Story Arcs (specifically the 'Micro-Arc' and 'Stories Come in Threes' sections) does a good job at breaking down what exactly Scenes X, Y, Z, and beyond mean in the context of the story. I'd suggest checking it out, but for now, I want to zero in on how you can craft the beginning and the end.
In this context, a beginning and ending are not your traditional literary introduction and conclusion — I like to think of them as a description of the world state. Simply put, there must be a change in your world state from the beginning to the end of the story. This could be as small as a piece of trash being picked up from the floor and properly disposed of, to the world itself getting torn apart/put back together. Queerious refers to this as the "status quo" in her essay, and it is absolutely imperative that the story has some sort of shift within it; without change, there is no story arc. With no story arc, you have a hollow story.
Queerious' Commentary: As a brief aside, when we are talking about a change to the "status quo", that can be a change in many different aspects of the story. As the reader, we want to be able to see that the events of the story mattered, and the best way to do that is showing the consequences of the characters' actions. This change could be:
- A Physical Change (ie. Loss of a Limb, Destruction of an Object/Building, etc.)
- A Mental Change (The character having a different opinion, perspective or emotional response)
- A Social Change (A change in relationship or opinion between characters)
- A Conceptual Change (A concept, that we thought we understood, is revealed to have an entirely different meaning by the end)
- A Temporal Change (The passage of time is the most common example)
What specifically changes varies from story to story, and how you show that change is often directly influenced by the theme of your work, but there is one consistency. By the end of your story, due to the actions of characters, something needs to be changed, often in an irreversible way.
To show how to go from concept to outline, follow along as I walk through my process with SCP-6342.
For some light context: Hana Thompson completely mindwiped herself, and her graduating high school class in SCP-6317. In the follow-up tale, Scars of Kodachrome, we see the difficulties of Hana trying to recover from this, as well as the shadow that still lurks as she tries to remember who/what exactly she is.
SCP-6342 is set at a point where Hana's well enough to travel, but she is riddled with anxiety about getting close to people again, general college anxiety, and a fear that she "missed her chance". While her fears are valid, they are only as scary as she makes them out to be — thus, connecting my emotional core and theme of the story back to the anomaly that serves as the framing device.
As such, my outline would look something like this:
Beginning: Hana Thompson is a Junior Field Agent at Site-19 recovering from long term exposure to cognitohazards, as well as large amounts of trauma following the events of SCP-6317. She is anxious, somewhat lacking in confidence, and is generally cautious in facing the world.
Scene 1: This scene takes place in a classroom at Serena Verdae College, an anomalous school in Providence, RI. In this scene, we learn about how Hana is coping with living at school so far (not well because barely anyone is there in the summer) and we see her struggle to connect with her classmates. There is some light worldbuilding (teacher has connection WL, learn more about cryptozoology and SCP-6342 itself) and the class is asked to find partners. There's an awkward pause and we are introduced to Vesper, a diviner and supporting character for this story. They enjoy teasing Hana, but is generally well-meaning. Scene ends with Hana and Vesper making plans to work the assignment pertaining to SCP-6342 together the next day.
Scene 1, as described, pushes forward both the story and Hana towards her goal, though just slightly. I personally write fairly low-stakes/action 'Scene 1's in SCPs, as I find it can help ease the reader into the story. It's best to set up any callbacks or red herrings4 in this section, because it allows for the audience to absorb that information early while they work on making their way through the rest of the article.
Scene 2: This scene takes place in a café and library. At this point in the story, we begin to learn more about our characters as they get to know each other emotionally. Vesper, knowing Hana's thoughts, helps her work through her anxieties, while also providing a window into the anomalous world. The pair discover more information on SCP-6342 and, in an act of trying to have her classmates view her as more interesting, decides to seek SCP-6342 during an upcoming storm.
Scene 2 allows for a deeper exploration of the characters, while also allowing for that resource collection I mentioned earlier. Hana now has the resources (a social support and the location of the anomaly) to overcome the obstacles laid out in front of her in the story. Vesper, acting as a support in this case, is the catalyst to push the story forward, by giving us a means to reflect on our main character and the anomaly itself.
Scene 3: This scene takes place at a lighthouse during a storm. Hana is incredibly doubtful of both finding SCP-6342 and herself, and almost leave the island before stumbling on the creature. Some tension is built, she ends up finding the crab, and gets enough confidence to take a photo of it using the camera from SCP-6317. The creature blocks her path, she gets more fearful, and it grows larger, nearly grabbing her before she is saved by Vesper. Together, Hana uses her anomalous ability to melt SCP-6342's photo, altering its physical form. The story ends with Hana and Vesper being picked up by the Foundation, and killing SCP-6342 on a rock by accident.
End: Hana is emotionally better compared to the beginning of the story, feeling a connection to this new world she finds herself in. In finding a friend in Vesper, Hana learns that the people at the college think highly of her and, to set up future works, sets up a story thread hinting that Hana receives more field agent assignments after this one.
Scene 3, as mentioned, provides the resolution for the piece, the tipping point in which the world state is most massively changed from beginning to the end. It is the "point of no return" as described by Queerious in her essay; the status quo is changed, allowing for the story to enter the world state of the end. For Hana, things are fully different, both in how she thinks about things, but also, in who her friends are.
You're probably wondering why I didn't talk about the containment procedures or the description, or really any of the connective tissues needed to effectively bring the story together. SCPs are obviously much more than their scenes, there has to be a sum to those parts to create a whole story. The first step is making the framework, like we did above; the next step is that context.
Part 3.5: What's in the In-Between
A story that features a series of major events can feel disjointed; to help create a cohesive flow through your story, you need to create transitional points. These points help bring everything together, rather than hopping around, taking your reader from point A to B to C. These transition points can happen prior to scenes, through the containment procedures and description, between the scenes, through cutaways or images, or after the scenes, through revised containment procedures and description.
At the point where you have the major scenes, whether you're outlining or drafting, it's important to recognize that these "transition" points in the story need to be short and effective. Often, they can do nothing more than act as a bridge or setup for the main scenes of your story. Staying in the scene too long, or failing to establish a connection between two scenes can cause these parts of the story to feel unnecessary, leading to critters and readers wondering why they were included in the first place.
So what make an effective transition? Like I referenced earlier, you need these transitions to be short and effective. In SCP-6342, besides a small introduction scene with Dr. Glass, a majority of my scene transitions are in the form of text messages between characters. These texts, while not seemingly too majorly important to the story, act as a place to ground the reader and act as small areas of progression in their own right.
If you want to make change apparent anywhere in your text, the transition points are effective in doing so, and you could make them as complicated or as simple as you want. Do you want to utilize css tricks to make something interactive for people to use to move to a different part of the story? Go right ahead. Do you want to just use an image or small section of text as a transition? That works perfectly as well. In time you'll learn what is better for the specific story you're trying to tell, and it will take some trial and error.
Queerious' Commentary: I like to think about a transitional moment as something that helps your reader shift in tempo, theme, emotion, topic or time. You can't jump from an emotional scene to something more subdued without it feeling strange; something is needed to let your reader pause, and make that mental shift.
I find that a visual element works best. This can be CSS, an image, or even just a formatting tweak or unique framing device. If you can have a visual distinction on the page, that is a cue for the reader that things are changing; they are primed to move between the scenes. The simplest, least intrusive version of this is a horizontal rule, while the most intrusive version would be something like list pages.
To understand how to find your in between moments, a fun exercise to try is setting up a small story. For example, imagine the beginning was you waking up, and the end was taking your dog for a walk. What important activities need to be done for you to reach the end of the story? What "less" important activities happen, and how do they lead into one another? Take some time to think about what this scene needs to work, and then think about how you can best apply that to the story you're trying to tell. With time, you will start to get a sense for how you can flow smoothly between the events of your story.
Part 4: The End?
Congratulations! You have reached the end of this essay, meaning the world state has changed in response to growing more knowledgeable on how to visualize a story. It's important to recognize that these skills aren't developed overnight, and the extent in which one person can visualize a story may be different depending on a variety of factors, such as style or preferred genre. That being said, I hope this was a general enough guide to help writers both new and old reflect on their current writing process.
Queerious' Commentary: Remember that there is no one way to do anything, let alone write a story. The examples and methods we showed above are useful, even if they don't work for you; by trying it and understanding where you differ, you will grow as an author by learning what does work for you. The more you can think about story and meaning in different ways, the better grasp you will have on being able to write and communicate your ideas..
If you learned something new from this, or if you want to tell me I'm wrong and that you have a different style, I encourage you to leave a comment to continue the discussion. This essay was created with the specifics of my style in mind, but I can recognize that this may not work at all for other people. I am interested and excited to hear about the processes or other writers, and I hope that discussion can lead to writers better understanding their current processes.
Now go write!