TroyL's Teachable Moments

A collection of teachable moments by admin TroyLTroyL. Pages discussed are articles posted to the site; on this page the item numbers have been XXXX-ed out. If you are the author of anything discussed here and you wish your work to be taken off this page, please contact Zyn.

TroyL commentary:

I think this feels like a teaching opportunity. I'm going to make some edits, post them here, and explain why. This isn't a rewriten, is by no means ready for posting, and I'm doing it mostly to demonstrate how these things can be used to add to the creep factor you seem to be going for.

My edits: A good Containment does more than just 'hold' the SCP. A good Containment makes the reader ask a question or two about the SCP itself. A lot of readers gloss over the containment, especially when it's very dry. This means that you have to make some good choices before you jump ahead to the rest of the SCP.

I did my edits to make people go 'wtf' and start them asking questions. I mostly just elaborated on your concept of a children's play room. What would be included there? How do those inclusions make the readers think? How does it alter or change the perceptions of the narrative you're trying to make? The exercise area was just me wanting to have a little fun. It kept with the 'child-like' theme you were going for, and I got to add a massive creep factor with it. At this point, your reader is either thinking this SCP is a child or a pedophile. Now, we get to subvert and mess with those feelings.

My edits: Firstly, I moved some of these concepts (books and toys) to the containment. They just fit better there, I felt. Others may disagree. "Appears" vs "Is" in this case was the first thing I wanted to do. The Foundation rarely claims to completely know. They record what they perceive.

I juggled around the points of description that you included. The trench coat idea (with an addition) was moved up to the body shape/size, as they're all references to appearance. Most people like to include these points first, as it gives the reader a proper mental image to work with. Remember: anything you don't include will be created by the reader's imagination, but failure to include enough information will result in their imagination creating nothing at all. It's a fine line we walk when we entice a reader to create but avoid deluging them in unnecessary information.

I've removed the O5 part. An O5 would never let their child play with an SCP, no matter how harmless it appears. With the Foundation, always keep in mind that they see every shiny Christmas present as a bear trap in disguise. They take precautions like mad, even if something is nice or pleasant. I also removed the bit about sitting in a corner when a child dies, as I'm not sure the implications of the statement were what you wanted (being that the Foundation killed a kid around SCP-XXXX to see if it would effect it).

So, we established and subverted some feelings, which is always fun to do, but now… We have no idea what we're doing here. There's no punch yet, no follow through on the swing. It's like you've thrown a fast pitch, but it's a ball instead of a strike. There isn't enough here yet to make it awesome, but you've got a starter concept, and that's not bad.