Per 
Short Essays for people whose work I critique, if I refer them here (most people can ignore this):
Disclaimer: This essay is in no way, shape or form official or community-approved. It is my personal take on one important aspect to making fiction worth reading. Many people may agree with me, and many may disagree. This essay may be continually updated as I get familiar with my own and other aspiring writers' mistakes.
Almost every SCP story and tale needs a human touch. There are precious few that can get away without it. What does that mean?
You need a character-based story, either as the main focus or a major segment of your page. You need someone the reader can best relate to. The closer you get to the thoughts and feelings of the reader, the better. Why? To punch through the layers of abstraction between the reader and simple descriptions of things happening or existing. The dry clinical description is fine and well, but also give us someone affected by your anomaly, who we can actually feel something about. We can cry with them, laugh with them, we can cringe when they get hurt, triumph when they win, or despair if they fail.
The character or characters do not necessarily need to be human, or living organisms, or even animate beings, if they still have emotions, needs and desires that human readers can relate to. Humans and human-like creatures are simply the easiest to relate to, particularly if it's an "Average Joe/Jane" everyman character, but non-humans can work just as well with a little effort!
What does not count by itself:
-Your super badass amazing awesome anomalous humanoid! I'm sure they are a fantastic idea and you love them very much. But surprisingly enough, people have difficulty relating to random people getting incredible superpowers out of nowhere or with minimal effort, and then everything eventually goes their way in the end. Because- surprise surprise- that breaks immersion and is not even remotely how real life generally works. If you have to write a superpowered individual who people will warm up to, you need to give them flaws. Struggles. Times when their powers are simply not enough. Times when they are simply in the wrong. Bring them down to earth, make them human first and super second. And don't be surprised if that's still not enough and people downvote or savage your entry anyways. It's going to be hard.
More on that: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/so-you-want-to-write-a-humanoid-scp-object
-A massive world-ending threat. Yes, world-ending threats are scary. But they're simply plain, abstracted descriptions until you see or hear about people affected by them. You must make them feel real to the reader by showing the danger in action! Think about how many people just don't care about climate change, or only take a few minutes out of their day to do anything about a real people-killing threat. Because no one they personally know has been affected in a major way. Yet. More often than not you need a relatable character, someone you feel you know, to be personally threatened. Then the threat feels real. As an alternative, bring the danger home by describing in intimate detail what it *does* to a human being.
-A simple description/history of a really weird creature, event or object. Yeah, weird is fun and interesting. But why should I care about some weird anomaly in a vacuum? It's simply a curio, an mere trivia fact in the SCP verse, hardly worthy of an SCP entry. There's plenty of much more immediate and compelling SCPs that deserve my attention instead. The reader is unlikely to care to care about your weird thing until it starts affecting humanity, threatening humanity or reflecting on humanity's actions. Then the Foundation gets involved, and people might start caring about it.
-Nameless Foundation/GoI agents and civilians getting massacred or ruined by an anomaly. Look, deaths of nameless mooks is barely worth our attention these days, that's why it's generally used as filler in brainless action moves. Give them names. Give them motivations, even if simple ones (pay, loyalty, ideology, etc). Give them feelings. Show their pain in horrible, close-up detail. Then they might stop being "GOC mook #24" and start being "Sgt Harold Stevenson, who wants to return home to his family, his ever-smiling wife and giggling baby daughter, and oh god why won't it stop spreading up my arm, please god I've already cut off my fingers and that didn't stop it it hurts so bad oh god no this isn't fair this isn't fair this isn't fair" . See what I mean?
Is it possible to write a good SCP (or about one) without a character focus or showing in detail its effects on relatable characters? Oh yes, definitely. But it requires a lot of skill and imagination to do right. You're best sticking with the tried and true approach.
Disclaimer: This essay is in no way, shape or form official or community-approved. It is my personal take on one important aspect to making fiction worth reading. Many people may agree with me, and many may disagree. This essay may be continually updated as I get familiar with my own and other aspiring writers' mistakes.
SCP articles are deceptively complex. A fair few people get the impression that SCP articles are simple descriptions of weird phenomena. They are wrong. SCPs are fundamentally short stories! That means a plot. Characters. Events. Feelings. Morals. Themes. Sometimes even multiple plots around the SCP, either sequential in parallel.
Seriously, look at a few of your favorite SCP article. Does it simply describe a thing that happens and leave it at that? No. There are logs of things happening to characters. In other words, a plot. How the Foundation, civilians or GOIs interact with an SCP is important. Without interaction, your anomaly is a curio, a knicknack which belongs in the Log of Anomalous Items or Log of Anomalous Events. Not an SCP entry.
So! Ideas for stock SCP plots:
- Exploration/capture logs: civilians or Foundation staff attempt to investigate or contain anomaly. Do they fail? Do they succeed? At what price?
- Insanity logs: civilians or Foundation staff are affected in some way by anomaly and write a series of journals become more and more deranged or incoherent as their situation breaks down.
- Containment breach: Skip gets loose. How does foundation clean it up? What's the aftermath or consequences?
- Foundation exploitation of skip: It could go horribly wrong, it could go horribly right, it could work fine and then suddenly backfire. If you're feeling particularly confident, you could even make everything go as planned, but find a way to keep that interesting.
- Interviews with eyewitnesses to the skip: How do they react? Does it affect them permanently? What does the Foundation do with them afterwards?
- Research/Funding conflicts: Even Foundation resources aren't unlimited. Researchers need to fight for grants. Do they treat the task of studying the skip honestly? Dishonestly? Is there rivalry between researchers?
- Experiment logs: Foundation tries to probe the limits and capabilities of the anomaly. Does it cause a containment breach? Do they find any interesting complications? Do they learn how to contain it better, or realize they were doing it all wrong all along? Do they learn more about the skip than they bargained for? Lots of ways you can go with this.
- Ethical dilemma: 05s, Ethics Committees and other staff with competing desires debate over what to do with an ethically thorny SCP. Who wins in the end? Does anyone win?
- More will be added as I think of them.
+++MORE TO BE ADDED LATER
Disclaimer: This essay is in no way, shape or form official or community-approved. It is my personal take on one important aspect to making fiction worth reading. Many people may agree with me, and many may disagree. This essay may be continually updated as I get familiar with my own and other aspiring writers' mistakes.
If your concept thread is less than 200 words or says "this isn't finished", or is missing entire sections of the concept thread template, Broken God help me, I will have no choice but to tell you: "This isn't even a complete thought. Finish it!". That will be the entirety of my official, detailed feedback.
Concept reviews are not a scratchpad. If you ask for a review of an idea that you haven't even finished, that shows a complete lack of effort in creating a quality product. It's only turnabout if you receive a complete lack of effort in reviews.
If you really need help fleshing out a concept, ask people in IRC for ideas. Do not ask me for a review- a review is for *finished* products. Would you want to taste-test raw, unprocessed meat? No, you would not. Cook your product, then ask for a taste-test.
"But I explain everything in my forum replies/drafts!" To me, the concept thread must stand on its own. I am not here to review your forum replies. Your draft is irrelevant until greenlit. 400 words in the original post is surprisingly generous if you trim your wordcount and omit details that don't help the plot. If you simply cannot fit the gist of a good narrative in 400 words, I will have to express doubts about your ability to coherently express a much larger, much more detailed work in 4000.
On the other hand, incomplete drafts are fine- drafts are long, specifics are hard and I will happily help you brainstorm where you can take your premise. Hit me with an incomplete draft, but please make clear it's incomplete so I do not mistake it for a complete work that's missing something.
That said, if I review your work and you barely make changes to your concept/draft, and ask me to take a second look, please don't be surprised if I say, "What changes?" and decline to take a third look. This has happened before. Don't do it. Please make sure I can say something I haven't already said, the second time around.
