I've been thinking a bit recently about appealing to audiences, about how to get ideas across to a certain kind of person, and how the effort to do that will inevitably alienate others.
I'm talking, of course, about an SCP that I wrote for Classic Con — SCP-7884. As of this date, I think that of all the short form I've written, for actual contests and Medium blogs and, yes, SCP, it is one of the best things I have made. It also got deleted in a few days.
Initially, it stung quite badly to see my work do so poorly; I had put a lot of time and effort into outlining the steps of a story. I asked myself: "What would a reader do here? How would they Google this? What would they find? Would this important term come up, and would it click in their mind?" I also asked myself: "What is it that SCP readers want in a Classic article?" The answer, as I determined it, would be a fun, screwy puzzle, one that unravelled itself as you read it. The realization of that was 7884.
Since it's deleted, I will summarize the article as best as I can: It was a heavily redacted entry, a Level One file. It described how people became… beasts of an unspecified sort when their wives or husbands or boyfriends or girlfriends told them that they loved them, unprompted, in a moment of sincerity and spontaneity. It told this through glimpses of an apocalypse, both in the form of a table and a note from some official (I intentionally left who it was blank in my mind; I thought it both unimportant and potentially troublesome for multi-interpretation work, which was my goal.) All of it, again, heavily redacted and in a terse style.
The basic idea I wanted to get across was this: The noosphere was, through some unknown ritual, damaged — this one transformed person, who wanted to get at the core of the Earth, tugged at it and initialized (the precise word I used.) Afterwards, it spread like a virus (I tagged the article as such), and soon, the varieties of ways in which people got this ended, and it became simply a flurry of people who buried themselves and were subsumed into the core of the Earth.
Why?
Here was the obscurity, the thing that was not well-done. An important detail to note was that Earth was not the only planet affected — I wanted to imply that there were alien species. This implication, like the planned cause, was not implied in any in-article way, however. Yes, there was the "death toll" that was in the tens of billions, but outside of that, you needed to reverse-image-search a cropped image of an external star system's graph, and you had to interpret the words I wrote in the note in the exact way that I meant them. The wrenching feeling that I got when I thought about something so toxic that it killed the human spirit was locked away, because all that was left through the black boxes and Google searches was a feeling that I had insulted the reader by writing something that was smarter than they were.
The truth was, I made a blunder that was far stupider than anybody noticed, because I assumed that people were me and that they would labor to understand the work the way I had understood it, because I am the reader who feels insulted and then tries to remedy themselves by solving and interpreting meaningfully the vague, sloppy work before them. I did not want to think of 7884 as sloppy or vague; indeed, I still think that it was some of my finest work, but it was something worse: mute.
In my hubris, I lost track of the real motive of writing, the thing that even pre-schoolers know when they pick up their first pencil and trace dotted lines on the thin white sheet before them. It was this: communication.
Stephen King in his seminal work On Writing introduced this as an idea to me. Before listening to his narration of it, it had never crossed my mind that fiction was a form of communication as valid and important as public speaking, body language, and cuisine. This idea greatly assisted me — in conjunction with the prosody which Jezixo's series has taught me to consider — because I really began to visualize who I was writing for for the first time.
For the longest time, I wrote for no one, simply clacking or scribbling away the plotline and perspective that seemed to be the most clear and clarifying (two distinct things!) to me. Making this process conscious, I think, helped with some of my outside work. But, in writing 7884, as I look back at the Discord messages sent on the server, trying to understand where I went wrong in this cycle and how my article could have such vocal supporters and yet an approval rating in the low 30s, I realized that I had taken this concept too far.
On this site, what's important is the basic model of the marketplace of ideas. While I am not deeply opposed to receiving crit before posting, as I was before posting 4012: The Play, I still find it easiest to visualize how people respond in this way. After all, you cannot say that writers who labor to fill the halls of a library or to fill up a used bookstore in a trailer have the same methodology or goal behind them. The thing that they are doing is creating and crafting, which is a remarkably different thing, only vaguely intersecting with the sphere of public writing that you want to succeed.
Because, goddamit, I wanted 7884 (Entwined) to succeed! I thought until now that merely putting in effort and writing something technically proficient was enough; it had never once been put to me that the ideas and the communication were capable of tanking a piece for someone. It's a nasty thing to say in crit channels, and on the Wiki, there aren't a lot of pieces that break the mold in a real way. I wanted 7884 to be a prototype for something that would do that — all I had done, in the end, was appeal to people who also saw that vision, who thirsted for it, and who loved what I wrote not for its virtues but for what it represented.
Unfortunately, representations and hopes do not get you very far.
My next work, which I will post for the Backrooms, has been written with this factor now a conscious thing at play: I have to make sure that the type of person who reads the Backrooms understands what I am writing and why I have wrote it. I cannot write a line that I intend to refer back to 3000 words later and pick up from exactly where it was dropped off — I would do that, but that's because I do not read nearly as much, and so chew on what I read for as long and in as much detail as possible. Now, I have to consider making it a paragraph, a memorable paragraph, and then specifically mentioning that it is that same thing when the payoff is made. It feels maddening, like I am writing for children, but then…
…Perhaps we are all children in our own way. Like children, we on these Wikidot Wikis share our work eagerly, lovingly, freely, against the force of evil that works in Entwined. And, like a child, I want it to be loved and appreciated. Like a child, when I read, I do not comprehend everything, no matter how much I want to — I cannot be inside the author's brain and commune with them as they engage in this holy hobby. And, like a child, I forgot for a period the Theory of Mind, and why it is essential to learning how to talk. Babies only talk when they know there is someone different to talk to; I, in writing 7884, had assumed that just because I was eloquent, I was understood. The reason I assumed that was exactly the opposite reason the baby learns to talk: I thought my audience was homogenous and perfectly understanding.
Next time, when I go for a better puzzle box article, that is the lesson that I will carry with me from the failure of 7884. It doesn't matter if your work is deep to people who are like you, because several billions are different from you at the most fundamental level. The authors who fail to understand that are the authors that rot in garages and trailers and dusty library shelves.
Fuck that.
