As of writing, I’ve published some 117 stories on the wiki, along with an assortment of hubs, components, and themes. These haven’t been evenly dispersed across my tenure on the site. More and more, I find myself posting less and less.
It’s difficult to quantify the dropoff, because a significant number of my earliest works on the site have been deliberately consigned to oblivion — which is part of my point. I have the semi-uncommon distinction of saying I’ve never had a piece go through the deletions process, but I can’t brag that I’ve never had a piece deleted at all. Through 2022 and 2023, I would frequently go back and self-delete articles I posted between 2018 and 2020. I rarely told anyone about it while I was doing it, because bringing attention to those articles irked me. I came to feel they were subpar, unsightly weeds in the garden of quality work I was trying to cultivate. When I posted them, I had been just as proud as I am today when I post an article — but a few short years later, their very existence offended me enough to wipe them from the sight. These weren’t articles slumming it in the +10s and +20s; most ranged from +50 to +150, and had healthy mixtures of praise and criticism in the comments. I could never articulate why they suddenly began to bother me so, what exactly was wrong with them. They just didn’t have it.
Clearly, on some basal level even three or four years ago during those deletion-sprees, I was intuitively aware of it. Some articles had it, some articles didn’t. It was a je ne sais quoi, a feeling that this works and is good, completely independent of whether my critters or readers enjoyed it or not. More than that, really, it was a feeling that this was something I could be proud of after the adrenaline of posting and the glowing buzz of having tons of people read it and say it was good faded. Writing on the wiki is inherently ephemeral — most writing is posted without much impact or fanfare, and forgotten about by the inner community rather quickly. I’ve been lucky enough to accrue enough of a readership and reputation that my posts leave a little bit longer-lasting of an impression, and I can hope for a day or three of conversation in chat about that new ROUNDERHOUSE joint. For something really special, months afterward, but those are few and far in between.
My point isn’t to whine — I’m happy and thankful for the place I enjoy on the site — rather, it’s to clarify that long-lasting pride in your work will never come from community response. Things just move too fast for that. It needs to come from inside, a profound and instinctive assurance that you can come back to this thing you’ve made in a few months and it’ll fill you with the same pride and happiness it did on posting it. But how can you know how you’ll feel months or years in the future when you’re debating whether or not to post this thing that all your critters are saying is good?
One could explain this phenomenon very simply — writing is like any other skill in that the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the better you are now the worse your first attempts seem. Shame and embarrassment are a natural response. I wanted to avoid that shame, so I wiped the articles. Like most simple explanations, it papers over some of the nuance. What is better, and what is worse, in this context?
Step one of identifying the problem was grasping what was common between all the articles I felt didn’t have it. For me, I found that they were just… stories. Narratives. Beginnings, middles, and ends. Some were comedic, some were more dramatic, but all narratives. That may sound intuitive — we are in the business of writing stories, after all — but if it was just shame at my past low-skill work, why didn’t it also apply for the many themes I posted early in learning CSS that are, uncharitably, among the worse themes on the site? Sure, I think they’re bad, but I never felt the same profound disgust at them as I did for the writing. I certainly never ran off in the dead of night to delete them.
So it has to do with stories. Was it simple a matter of the quality of the writing? I think now it would behoove me to provide an example: my (second) first article, SCP-4049. This is the second incarnation of this particular article; the first got to +10 and plateaued. As a fifteen-year-old not wanting my debut on the site to be a failure, I self-deleted it, rewrote it a bit, and posted it again a week later. It’s sitting at +114, but that’s been a slow climb over eight years, and I’m rather suspicious of how much of its score is based on the merits of the article over the novelty of it being ROUNDERHOUSE’s first.
I digress. If you look in the history, it was temporarily moved to the deleted: category. This article, too, fell victim to my impulsive fits of embarrassed deletion, and only survived because a few friends told me that I would regret deleting my very first article on the site. Regardless of how true that is, today, it serves as an example of the kind of thing I wanted to delete. Let’s summarize it:
- conprocs more focused on communicating this cool mental image of a kill corridor than intriguing the reader,
- a trite, unimaginative SCP-ification of a mythological figure,
- a fairly boring exploration log that ends in spooky melodrama,
- stilted, wooden dialogue,
- no real conclusion or payoff.
Not great. So these must be the issues — just poor quality of writing. I did start at 15 on the site, and many of the articles I deleted were written as a teenager. Certainly no one can expect every young writer to be Mary Shelley. But let’s take SCP-2304 as a counterexample. It was posted only a few brief months after, and despite my growth as a writer and person, I remain fairly proud of it:
- half-assed conprocs,
- an unimaginitive SCP-ification of deep-fried memes,
- dialogue that is admittedly less stilted though no less unsubtle,
- dependence on chat CSS I was hoping would impress folks,
- a somewhat-okay conclusion to the emotional narrative.
It’s a little better, but it’s not much, if we’re looking strictly at the quality of writing and thought put into it. So what makes this so much different, to me?
Romero: Tha- That's the fucking thing. I can actually do it, I can open the damn link and if, for some fucking reason, it actually kills me, my last thoughts won't be about how many other people I hurt.
It’s actually about something. Sure, it’s communicated with all the subtlety of a brick through the windshield, but there is a very real emotional story and idea I wanted to impart into the article, the latent kind of misery associated with being too much of a coward to end it and how easy it is to just stew in that. Before anyone starts worrying about me, I’m fine; I was just a very moody and depressed teenager, and writing was one of the few hobbies I cared about enough to invest any of my self into.
What does SCP-4049 have going for it in terms of being about something? It’s about… an SCP-ification of Artemis creating horrible beasties and punishing people. Not quite the same level of personal investment, right? But it’s not just about personal investment, because I have other stories I’m immensely proud of that took no personal investment from me. A more recent example is SCP-8976, Diagraphephobia. Superficially a story about infovores and Maria Jones, but quite obviously a story about dementia. I’ve never lost anyone to dementia; my heart goes out to anyone who has. But it’s not an experience I’ve personally felt, and communicating that in the article wasn’t drawing on any personal experiences. Nonetheless, I was proud of it both because of the quality and because it was about something real and tangible and identifiable. There was a theme and an idea I wanted to express, it was more than characters going around and doing things without any deeper goal.
That’s what it is, to me. A story that accomplishes its goal because it’s about something. Anyone can slap together characters bandying about and glue a stinger to the end, but when you make a story, you’re trying to construct something greater than the sum of its parts. You want it to leave a lasting impression — not just on the reader, but on yourself too. Some stories need to have what they’re about be front and center, and some do better when its implicit. SCP-7005 doesn’t have to come out front and have the characters directly say what it thinks about civilization for it to be enjoyable, because we consume these messages subconsciously too. But as a writer, it benefits you to have something in mind when you’re writing. A message, a goal.
So, obviously I think every single story on the site needs to be a metaphor for depression or an exploration of the human condition, right? Of course not. SCP-7000 is a slapstick comedy for the vast majority of its runtime, but has an emotional tick that truly elevates it to art. My SCP-5140 is about nothing more complex than scary mountain. For my part, I write Undervegas, which is probably the most consistently low-brow humor on the site. There’s succubus jokes and idiotic puns. Most Undervegas articles aren’t even as complicated as the anomaly they come packaged with, but they’re fun to write because they make me laugh and I know they make other people laugh too. Indeed, being aware of the idea that stories need to be about something deeper has made me better at writing Undervegas — here, too, I have an example:
There’s a movie, Sullivan's Travels, about a film director in the Great Depression who grows sick of making empty comedies that fill the theaters but he feels lack artistic substance. He sets out on a journey to live as a tramp to get an idea for the kinds of socially-conscious dramas that the common man needs right now. It takes getting hit on the head and becoming a temporary amnesiac for him to realize that people need to laugh, and never more than when their circumstances are shitty. Entertaining people is a noble artistic goal in and of itself. But if that’s what you want to do, then be aware that that’s your goal and make that the yardstick by which you measure the success of your work.
We’ve gotten quite far away from the original point now: why have I stopped writing for the wiki? Well, I haven’t, but I have slowed down a lot. The stuff I write now is half the quantity of what I wrote before, but I’m twice as proud of it because whether it’s dumb, silly fun like Director House getting married for tax purposes or something serious and meaningful like Bone Proposal, I go into each project with a clearer idea of what I want to write about and what I want to communicate to the reader with it. I know what the goal is beyond “write a story”, and then when I finish, I can better evaluate whether it accomplishes that goal, and if it doesn’t, what changes need to be made for it to do so.
This is an occluded awareness of the writing process that it took me eight years to develop in a way I could articulate. I suspect you can’t really internalize it without going through a similar journey yourself. But I’m hoping that this motivates at least a few people to slow down and start thinking about what they write. No one has ever been a worse author for doing so.