User blog comment:MoonshadowX/what makes a good creepypasta, in anyone else's opinion?/@comment-26475800-20160527042342

Besides what Humbolt said, which is all great advice, I would add find something that really frightens you. Don't cheapen it with buckets of unnecessary gore. That is not to say don't add any of the red stuff, but do it with taste and control. Rembrandt didn't just throw paint at a canvas, leave that shit to those modern art yuppies, and you shouldn't throw shit ideas at your page and hope it sticks.

Think the story through. This is kind of a catch 22 for me, because I never have an outline for where my story is going. I will write, but normally I think about a story for a few days before writing a word of it. What are the people like? Who did what? What secrets are people hiding? All of those things will make your characters stronger.

Pacing and plot are very important. It doesn't matter if you have the best plot in the world, if the pace is off the story is dead. The is one of the big things with creepypastas (besides all the other correct stereotypes that are labeled to the genre,) beginning writers don't have the slightest idea of how to pace a story.

The best advice anyone can give you is to read as much as you can though. It doesn't matter what you read, so long as you are reading it. If it sucks, why does it suck? find the problems with it and make sure you don't have that happening in your story. But the best things to read are novels. Real, published novels that weren't self-published by your friend. Someone who worked hard to get through to an agent or published through a legit publisher. Their books may still suck, but they did something write to get noticed. Find what they did do right and try and incorporate that into your story.

I'm not saying steal someones work, people who do that should be put to sleep. But look at the pacing, the word choice, how the plot develops, things like that. The foundation of every story is the close to the same. Some times it takes a bigger foundation for a bigger story, but it will give you what you need to know on how to write.

And if you really want to write something scary, you need to figure out what scares you. Everyone is afraid of something, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or has no idea about who they are. You need to figure out how that situation would make you feel and put that on paper. How would you react to the crisis that is unfolding in your story? Put that on the paper, and be honest. Not every one will go search through the house if they heard a noise, sometimes they would lay in bed and pretend to be asleep.

Understanding human reaction is key to writing. That is what makes that open scene in 27 weeks later so good. The man ran giving his family to the zombies. It is a fucked up choice, but one that a lot of people would do if they were ever put in that situation. We would all like to think that we would be the hero and smash someones brains in with a baseball bat if we had a home invasion, but that isn't always the case. I think more people would be sneaking out the window.