Tale Foundry

Anyone who's delved into SCP has felt it: that strangeness. The competing sensations of curiosity and mystification. As soon as you get a taste you have to know more, even though you know part of the fun is knowing that you'll never know. A paradox of disbelief. It's a strange, strange thing, not seen in much fiction. Let's try and figure out how to capture it and make use of it ourselves.

SCP is such a strange example of fiction, so many breaches of reality in one place. Maybe we can learn a little something from it about how to categorize this stuff...

"How do I tell the audience about my world without losing their attention?" It's a question pretty much every writers asks at some point in their career. If you find yourself vomiting up pages' worth of information to catch your audience up, this discussion could potentially be a good starting place for you...

We writers can get pretty weird about our craft. The further we slide into our obsession with creating (or the failure to), the stranger the lines of logic we begin to follow, the more perilous our mental paths. I've been down all of these avenues, and far more beside. Hopefully this video will help some of you to notice whether you're doing the same. The awareness alone can do a great deal to help... But, maybe we should do videos on each of these lies on their own, provide some more in depth information on how to untangle ourselves from them?

An old dream hunter, past his prime. A tempest, for lost love. Something simple to tie the frayed threads of family back together. Reviewing your stories this month was a somber, bittersweet joy.

An outline is a complicated thing. How do you organize your story? Where do you focus? What is YOUR story, and what's the story someone else is telling you to write? This isn't everything you'll need for outlining, but the Matryoshka Method will help you organize your ideas—ensure they're all connected in the ways that matter most.

Dracula is an icon. There are countless iterations of him, countless stories that have drawn inspiration from Brahm Stoker's original novel. But... they've mostly been missing out on something. In just a few little throw-away lines, we find something that could change our image of the book forever, and how we draw inspiration from it.

Does genre box us in? Does it take some of the creativity out of our craft, turn it more into a predictable manufacturing process? Easy to think jump to a conclusion here, but our answer might surprise you...

Lovecraft is basically the grandfather of weird fiction, a name he gained for himself by writing the infamous Cthulhu mythos. But the tentacle monsters and aliens are far from the strangest thing Lovecraft wrote about. In fact, much of his life was spent on an entirely different body of literature: The Dream Cycle Let's take some time to appreciate the setting of his dream cycle stories, The Dreamlands. Who knows, we might even learn something in the process...

One of things we writers try to do with our writing is control emotion. Not just the big, dramatic motions, but that lingering, ambient background emotion as well. But that's a really weird, nebulous territory to approach. At the very least, it helps to know where your emotion as writer ends, and where the emotional response of the audience begins.

A lot of stories are doomed before they ever begin. Why? Because the author is paralyzed by the idea of finding the perfect opening line. It's hard... but maybe it doesn't have to be.

Cosmic horror is a strangely fascinating subject. You could talk for a literally eternity about your place in the cosmos, your feels of ignorance, impotence, insignificance. ...but what happens when you lose the luxury of time? What happens when you have to confront all of these things here and now, at the edge of the void? Hellstar Remina gives us a peak at what that might look like.