Creepypasta Wiki:Quality Standards/Draft

__NOINDEX__ These are the Quality Standards of the wiki - what we look for in a good story. Note that these are applied mainly to stories where the mentioned elements detract from the story itself.

Please note that while these are generally guidelines, passing these guidelines is, in fact, a requirement. Any story that fails these standards will be, without prejudice to the author or any other factors, deleted on-sight.

There are, however, a few standards that are basically rules - unless following them  ACTUALLY ' detracts from the story. These are the minimum quality standards, and they are listed in the following section.

Minimum Standards

 * 1) Before you post your article to this site you MUST have proofread and spell-checked the document. This includes—but is not limited to—the proper use of capitalization, spelling, punctuation, spacing, and paragraphs. Most document editors, with the exclusion of notepad, have a spellcheck and a grammar check feature built in. Failing that, there's always SpellCheck.net. You may also use source mode in the wiki editor to spell check.
 * 2) If you upload a pasta that is terribly unedited or is a massive wall of text, you acknowledge that it can and in most cases will be deleted as soon as it is uploaded.
 * 3) In this case, kindly leave a message on the talk page explaining that and one of our editors can surely help you out without penalty to you.
 * 4) Pages that are a single, massive block of text (Wall-o-Text) are uninteresting and impossible to read. All of the terrible spelling and grammar really make the site look uneducated and childish on the whole and will be deleted.
 * 5) This is not to say you must upload pages without any mistakes or you will be banned. This is to cut back on the kinds of pages that are either Each Word Capitalized, or where the author has some weird aversion to ever using a capital letter and/or spaces after punctuation.
 * 6) Pages that are a wall or walls of text (long blocks of text with absolutely no spacing between paragraphs) will be deleted instantly and you will be warned.
 * 7) Pages That Are Written Completely In Title Case (capitalizing the first letter of each word) Will Also Be Deleted Instantly. There's no sane reason as to why anyone with a brain and a knowledge of language would write like this.
 * 8) Pages with a large percentage to all of the story lacking spaces after punctuation will be deleted instantly and you will be warned as stated above.

Page Titles
You must properly capitalize your page titles. See the Style Guide for a refresher course in capitalizing titles.

The long and the short of it is that titles must adhere to the following standards:


 * 1) Properly Capitalized.
 * 2) Contain no periods. A title is not a sentence. A decorator question mark or bang is fine in many cases, but periods are not.

What We Generally Look For

 * Your story should have a consistent plot. It also should have a decent, original plotline formulated of different events.
 * CAPS are not scary. DON'T TYPE EVERY WORD LIKE THIS TO REPRESENT EXCITEMENT OR FEAR. That's why this (!) exists. If you are going to use caps, please keep in mind that they need to be limited.
 * There should be a good level of description. Not too little so that the story comes out vague/bland/boring, not too much so that it doesn't halt the story line.
 * Avoid awkward phrasing. Make sure there's a flow. Read your story aloud to yourself to make sure everything rolls off the tongue right.
 * If the formatting of the story breaks visual mode on the editor (Classic or not), it will be deleted. To prevent this, use the Source mode on the editor and paste your story there. If needed, add a line break between paragraphs to avoid the resulting wall of text.
 * It should spelled correctly (already in there). Also, know the differences: "Your" (possessive) "You're" (You are). "There" (A place) "Their" (possessive) "They're" (They are.) "It's" (It is) "Its" (possessive)
 * The story needs to make sense. Not as in "weird" sense, but it needs to be consistent and readable.
 * There should be some kind of hook. Something to grab the reader's attention and entrench them in the story.


 * (Micropastas) There should be a plot of at least two (2) events. Micropastas may not be "plot-driven", persay, but a story always has some form of plot. The events can be extremely minor, even slightly unnoticeable, but they still need to be there.


 * (Poems) Please use Stanzas.
 * (Poems) It should tell SOME kind of story or have a sense of interpretation.
 * (Poems) It should have some kind of meter and prose.
 * (Poems) It cannot be AABB rhyme scheme. (First two lines rhyme, second two lines rhyme. First doesn't rhyme with third and second doesn't rhyme with fourth.)
 * (Poems) It needs to have some depth and complexity. Stick to the same subject and do not jump around.
 * (Journals/Diaries) It should read like a journal. I'm not going to update my blog/write in my diary when there's a murderous beast/evil plushie/someone I owe money to outside my window trying to kill me.
 * (Journal/Diaries) People have this odd habit of acting like a journal is going to get read by someone else. Please don't. A journal is the opposite: Personal. On the other hand, a blog post would be a more public thing read by an audience.
 * (Journal/Diaries) People aren't going to explain to themselves who people are. Dropping hints can be fine, such as events where a person is engaged with something they like, but full on saying it is unrealistic.

Original Characters
This isn't fanfiction.net. We don't prohibit Original Characters, but if you are intent on writing a story with them, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not base them off a pre-existing character. Any stories involving "Jeff-Inspired", "BEN-Inspired", "Photonegative Mickey-Inspired", or other "Inspired" characters will be deleted as spin-offs.

Questions to Ask Yourself

 * Is this progressing the story?


 * Is this interesting, engaging or making the story better in any way?


 * Is this necessary to understand the story and/or will it come back later.

FAQ
Q. Why so many standards?

A. Would you rather read something legitimately decent, such as this, or something like this? Quite a simple question. The first. We want quality work, not something that had no effort put into it.

Q. Why can't you lax on them a little bit?

A. We had lower standards, and it severely downgraded the quality of the site. A lot of stuff similar to what I posted above in the second link got posted. We're still trying to whittle down the ridiculous 10,000+ page count - a good number of them being terrible.

Q. My story got deleted as per these standards. What do I do?

A. For one, if a reason isn't left, ask an admin on their talk page. Some admins have a talk page set up specifically for deletion reason giving - and they're willing to critique when they have the time. Then, after you found the reason, improve on it and use Deletion Appeal. If it was not good in the slightest, keep trying, and use the Writer's Workshop Board for help.

Q. What do you mean by description?

A. Put an image in the author's head. Don't overblow it and halt the storyline but don't make it vague and boring. Straight sentences without any form of legitimate description tend to make for a boring story. Overdone description? Same thing.

But it's also about finding the perfect amount to go with your story. Is your story like Tobias Wolff's Hunters in the Snow, a story which relies upon description of the setting and character attitudes along with Tub's perception of the other hunters in order to provide a symbolic foreshadowing of events? Or is it like Ernest Hemmingway's Hills Like White Elephants, which is mainly conversation and dialogue between two people and doesn't have to rely on it? Generally, it will be somewhere in between.

Q. Do I have to spell everything correctly in a dialogue area? I want to intentionally misspell a certain character's dialogue.

A. Sort of. It depends upon the character's dialect. If it's a southerner, what words do they commonly mispronounce? "Your" would be acceptable as "Yer", "Get" as "Git", so on, so forth. A stereotypical Russian badass will occasionally leave out words such as "an" or a "the" every now and then, because they don't fully know the English Language or it's not their first language. That character's dialect determines whether the intentional misspell is bad, good, or in between.

Q. What do you mean by must make sense? Isn't this Creepypasta where stuff isn't supposed to "make sense"?

A. I mean the story itself, not it's elements. Dogscape is a wonderful story that makes no sense or anything else. The setting is made of dog, the plot line is weird, and people do things commonly that we wouldn't even consider touching. On the other hand, you've got the bad side: Things like this. That's the bad kind of sense. I can't even explain how that story doesn't make sense because there isn't a safe point to stand on and explain from. It's fairly literally senseless. That's what I mean by make sense.

Q. How are these standards enforced?

A. In a basic variety of ways. If it's not too far off - for example, just having a few misspellings, it's edited out. On the other hand, if it's leaving out plot points, has a number of holes, is excessively bland, etc, it gets deleted.

Though really, these are less like rules and more like guidelines. They only apply if said things detract from the story. While meeting them is a rule, these are meant for a general idea of why a user's story could get deleted.

Q. There's nothing about "creepy" or anything. Is there some kind of guideline towards unnerving the reader or something?

A. Not really. Creepy is more of a subjective term here - that is, an opinion. We look at more objective approaches toward the acceptance of a story. That being said, we aren't expecting your first story to be a Suggested Reading worthy thing - just that you put effort into it.

Q. These are way too strict! You're all just a bunch of corrupt assholes who delete stories for fun! You deleted my pasta that my second grade teacher liked even though it was riddled with grammar errors, plotholes, and was a wall of text! I'm going to Deviantart!

A. Okay.