How To Be A Creepypasta

The other day, a few friends and I were discussing the concept of “creepypasta”, which one of them had just discovered via the Creepypasta Wiki. Now, I’ll admit that I was not familiar with the wiki, or with the fact that creepypasta had become an outright genre, but it didn’t take long for me to feel at home.

And by “at home” I mean “terrified of the Slender Man.”

When I was a child, I had a huge window over my bed, and I was deathly frightened of waking up to find someone looking into it. The Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” has a scene where two monsters appear suddenly in someone’s kitchen window, and it’s the only TV show ever to give me nightmares. Let’s save my psychoanalysis for another day, however.

The Creepypasta wiki has a pretty concise definition of what they document: A Creepypasta is a short story that is posted on the internet that is designed to unnerve and shock the reader. One of my other friends, as we gleefully all tried to top each others’ terror, suggested Candle Cove as the platonic ideal of Creepypasta. I went and read it, and my reaction went from “This is pretty tame” to “Oh, I see where they’re going” to “HOLY — WHAT NO THIS IS NOT OKAY” at the last “comment” on the fictional “messageboard”.

I was working on some tyepsetting for The Dead Isle while I was having this discussion, and what struck me almost immediately after reading Candle Cove was that I had written creepypasta myself, and inserted it into The Dead Isle. In this case it’s literally a single paragraph:

It is brilliant in its simplicity, tumbled and smoothed by decades of telling; at heart it is nothing more than a perplexing puzzle over a train gone missing, disappeared off its tracks one foggy night in the middle of empty country. The pleasure is in the build and the epilogue — the mysterious goings-on beforehand, the ill engineer who would eventually disappear with the train, the engine troubles, the peculiar cargo, the unease of the conductor and driver. The frantic search, and the reports long after of drivers who would see a train coming towards them and brace for a collision only to find there is no other engine. The odd pieces of rusted iron discovered years later and quite too far from the track to mark a derailment.

I wrote this, and it still makes me shiver. In the latest extribulum read-through, half my readers wanted me to take this out and put the actual story in instead, and the other half thought it was much, much scarier this way. I’m inclined to agree.

There is one reasoning which says that it’s scarier this way because for sheer horror value prose on a page can never compare to the images one forms in one’s mind; I learned this very young while discussing The X-Files with a friend who was working on her master’s degree in English Lit. She pointed out to me that the reason a certain scene was so horrifying was that we don’t see the gore or the blood or the aliens: we only see Agent Scully’s reaction to what she’s seeing, and we form in our minds something more terrible than TV could show us.

But the other reason that creepypasta in particular is so effective is that it’s not actually a story. Of course it is a story, in the “I made this up” sense, but it’s not structured as a story. I remarked to my friends that the whole gestalt of it is deeply effective, and when asked what I meant, I replied:

It’s the idea of a ghost story that’s not told as a story. It’s a factual account, a documentary (like Blair Witch), a piece of ephemera or, like Candle Cove, a series of comments; in Dead Isle, it’s the afterword to the actual story, and describes the story being told as a secret mystery in the dark, between two other people and only overheard by the author.

It’s scarier because there’s no “this is a story” disconnect; the traditional story format that reassures us that we’re experiencing something openly false isn’t present. Instead what we’re faced with is a construct we’re used to being truthful, like Wikipedia or a discussion between friends, perverted into something that can’t possibly be true. There’s nothing there to reassure us that it’s “just a story”.

This can happen even when something isn’t actually fictional, as well. To illustrate this, I linked my friends to the Bloop, a mysterious underwater noise picked up by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997. The Bloop in itself is not that scary, though I get unnerved whenever the ocean makes noises that science can’t explain. But wikiwandering from the Bloop is dangerous: the first place you’re likely to end up is the List of Unexplained Sounds.

Wait, wait — there’s a list of these things? Oh my God, did you listen to the Train?

A part of your mind is yelling, in the background, that there’s a perfectly logical explanation for these noises; a whale passing by or a really big air bubble or the Earth’s crust settling (which is in itself a little scary) but that only makes things worse, because it reinforces the idea that all this stuff actually happened and sometimes still happens and what if there’s a giant sea monster? What if? And it’s scarier because it’s presented by a trustworthy source as absolute fact: Wikipedia.

Eventually clicking on links will get you to UVB-76. For my money UVB-76 is the most terrifying unexplained noise of all, because it involves people, sentient beings capable of rational thought and strategy, and we can’t find them. The Cold War was pretty much over by the time I was aware enough to follow politics, so it’s not the fact that it’s a Russian radio station that freaks me out; it’s the fact that we don’t know where it is or what it means, and it’s possible the people who are occasionally heard on the radio don’t know it’s there.

Horror is a pretty powerful genre, though a discussion of humanity’s essential morbidity is perhaps best saved for some other time. But fear, even fear within some other genre, is equally powerful if not more so. I used this heavily in Trace, to really nail home just how evil the antagonist is; one of the strongest reactions I’ve ever had from my readership was the reaction to the dinner scene, where everyone is so excited because it’s pizza night, and then they discover mold under the cheese on the pizza — and then the other diners surrounding the narrator keep eating it.

The unexpected can cause a sudden, hard, powerful emotion in someone, and when it’s used well it can be a great tool for any writer.

Start Your Difference Engines!

I’ve talked a lot about the reader-writer relationship here, and a lot about my new novel The Dead Isle as well, and now they’re coming together like brass and leather in an editorial steampunk extravaganza.

Starting on April 20th and going through May 14th, I’ll be posting a chapter a day of the newly rewritten The Dead Isle to my fiction blog, The Original Sam. I won’t be posting daily updates at WordPress, but I will make an index post on the 20th which you can check daily for new chapters. And if you’re on LiveJournal you can always friend the blog and get updates on your friendslist!

I am inviting all readers to come out and review the chapters as they go up, pointing out everything from typos to anachronisms to just plain poor writing. (It happens to the best of us. At least, I hope.) This is the extribulum process, a part of building the bond between writer and reader rather than between seller and buyer, making the reader an integral part of the editorial process. It helps me to understand what stories people want to hear and how they want to hear them.

So come out to read and critique The Dead Isle! And if you have friends who are interested in editing, steampunk, fantasy, alternate history, or digital publishing, tell them too! The Dead Isle is family-friendly (there’s very little swearing or violence and no sex) and while I may be biased I think it’s a heck of an adventure.

The Part Where I Hate The Damn Book

Writers — okay, some writers, and on judgey days I think mostly bad writers — like to wax poetic about how crazy they (we) are. There are a lot of ways to do it, because there are almost limitless ways to be crazy, or pretend to be crazy, when you’ve set yourself up as someone with the power to create entire worlds. Worse, writers tend to think they have the right to create entire worlds, because they have the capability.

Not that we don’t, but you can see how that kind of unconscious arrogance can open the door to a whole flood of self-assumed crazy.

Writers talk about being driven crazy by ideas, by creative compulsions, by writer’s block, by the creative process. Not to stomp on anyone else’s process (he says, stomping on it) but I tend to think about ninety percent of it is self-indulgent bullshit. I’ve never had any patience for people who claim their creativity controls them rather than vice versa. I have every sympathy with people who struggle to create, but if I see one more film about someone who’s spent the last two years suffering from writer’s block, I will throw something heavy at the screen.

I didn’t write for the first thirteen years of my life. I loved reading, but I wasn’t interested in that form of creativity. I actively avoided it — you would not believe the sulks I threw — and when I was in my twenties I chalked that up to well-meaning teachers trying to force creativity rather than just letting kids be creative. With more perspective, knowing that I’ve always been a shy person, I think I found the written word too revelatory. I wasn’t okay with sharing that much of myself. In some ways I’m still not; I’m embarrassed to write compelling scenes and strong emotions because they risk showing too much and it’s too easy for other people to use them to get to me, if they know how to go about it right.

The better you are at writing, the easier it is to hide all the weird emotional crap that everyone has but nobody wants to admit to. In inexperienced writers it’s easy to tell the part of the story that really gets them off, but the definition of a skilled writer is someone whose writing isn’t obvious. The thing is, that weird emotional crap is still there, and the writer knows it’s there. A fetish doesn’t have to be sexual; it can be narrative, and revealing that a certain situation or scene strokes your ego or satisfies your lizard hindbrain can be much more embarrassing than the stigma attached to having a kinky thing for exhibitionism or feet or whatever. People are much less squeamish about using emotional desires to manipulate or harm than they are about sexual ones.  Some people don’t care if their freaky is public and visible, and that’s a very well-adjusted way to be because freaky is a dumb social construct meant to keep people in line, but I will be honest: I am not that well-adjusted. My kinks, literary, sexual, or otherwise, are private, and I like them that way. There are absolutely deep, messed-up reasons that I’ve spent a lot of time studying masks.

Every time I work on a book, sometime during the edits I start to just hate the hell out of it. There are plenty of reasons; boredom with prose I’ve read too many times, weariness of beating the same dead literary horse I’ve already spent months on, eagerness to be on to something new. I could talk a lot (and have) about the discipline a writer needs in order to serve the story, and the discipline to grit your teeth and push through the edits is a part of that, but I think the biggest reason I spend a phase hating my book is that I think everyone can see everything that’s wrong with it and thus everything that’s wrong with me.

Which is nonsense, and eventually I snap out of it. Most people who read my prose don’t notice the flaws I notice and wouldn’t give a sweet goddamn if they did, because they’re not actually out to get me. They might find flaws in the book, but they’re highly unlikely to be the same ones I see.

The first novel I went through this with, Nameless, I was genuinely worried I’d never like the book again. I did like it by the time I was done, and a few months ago I read it and was surprised by how much I still like it. Since that first time, I’ve been okay with hating the book. I know soon enough I’ll be done with that and I’ll have something really good on the other side. And frankly, I’d rather hate the book than hate myself. Seems more productive in the long run.

I don’t write to bare my soul — I think most good writers don’t, for the same reason they don’t talk about how crazy they are: they’re not interested in being obvious — but it tends to happen anyway. When it does, I’m grateful for the years I spent not-writing, because those years made me reasonably sensible, and that gets me through the messed-up parts of the process, so I can get back to the fun parts.