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These are the quality standards of the wiki. Following these rules is essential to writing a good creepypasta or just a good story in general.

Please note that these guidelines are mandatory to every user posting stories on this site. Any story that fails these standards will be, without prejudice to the author or any other factors, deleted. If you are looking for a more in-depth explanation as to why your story was deleted, you can ask an admin, post it to the Writer's Workshop, or read this guide: So We Deleted Your Story: An Overview.

Minimum Standards

  • 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, like Microsoft Word, have a spelling and a grammar check feature built in. We suggest using that, then copying and pasting into source mode on the site to eliminate any possibility of formatting conflicts. Failing that, there's always SpellCheck.net. You may also use source mode in the wiki editor to spell check. As a sidenote, ALWAYS store a copy of your work locally on your PC or tablet, or on the cloud. This will save you a lot of trouble later if the story is found to not be up to quality standards.
  • If you upload a pasta that has the issues outlined above, you acknowledge that it can—and in most cases will be—deleted as soon as it is uploaded. Pages that are a single, massive block of text (walls of text) are hard to read. In short, they will be deleted. If you have questions with either of these violations, kindly leave a message on one of the administrator's talk pages and one of them will gladly help you out. We are trying to improve the overall quality of stories on the site and we need your help and dedication to do this, as a well-written story should be the author’s prerogative.
  • This is not to say you must upload pages without any mistakes or you will be banned. We all make mistakes, and we have more than enough qualified editors (including you!) to help out with minor tweaks.

Page Titles

You must properly capitalize your page titles. See the Style Guide for a refresher course in capitalizing titles or check out this page.

If the title of your story begins with "a, an, or the", don't forget to add the Sort template. For example, if your story is titled "The Creepy Guy", add {{Sort|Creepy Guy, The}} to the story at the bottom of the page in the Source editor.

What We Generally Look For

  • Your story should have a consistent plot. It also should have a decent, original plotline. Please note that if your story shares an extremely similar premise to another story or uses a number of clichés or tropes, it will likely be deleted for not being up to our standards. This is extremely important. Your story could have impeccable grammar and meet every other rule, but if the story is riddled with plot holes and/or is very generic, we will have to delete it.
  • Please do not capitalize every word (or entire phrases) as a means of conveying emphasis. Italics or exclamation points suit the same purpose and are generally viewed as being less gimmicky.
  • There should be a good level of description. Too little description will make the story vague/bland/boring and too much detail can slow down the story and make it hard to keep reading.
  • Avoid awkward phrasing. Make sure there's a flow. Read your story aloud to yourself to make sure everything rolls off the tongue naturally.
  • 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 (see above again). If needed, add a line break between paragraphs to avoid the resulting wall of text.
  • Don't indent in Source Mode. Yes, in books, every new paragraph is indented. However, the wiki's format is quite different in that indentation isn't used. If you indent on here, your text will show up in an annoying box with a slidebar you have to use to read the story from left to right. This can make it difficult for stories to be read easily.
  • Know the differences: "Your" (possessive) "You're" (You are). "There" (a place) "Their" (possessive) "They're" (they are.) "It's" (it is) "Its" (possessive).
  • Your story needs to be coherent. It should be consistent and readable. Now, many of you are saying, "Wait, what if I want to have a more fragmented approach to telling my story, ala David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino?" Well then, go for it. Just make sure that things eventually come together.
  • Do not include Zalgo text in your story (or anywhere else on the wiki). Trust us, it may look weird and creepy, but it won't serve to elevate your writing in any way. Usage of bold or italic text in its place suffices perfectly.
  • Do not post AI-generated stories or stories with segments that are AI-generated. We do not accept stories created by AI, as publishing them is tantamount to plagiarism. Some nuances of AI story generation include lack of tone/stylistic flair, cliched story progression, and inconsistencies in descriptions, plausibility, and narrative flow. The first offense for doing so will result in a warning, the second offense will result in a lengthy ban.
  • Stories that fail to capitalize proper nouns, have homophone issues, multiple misspellings, grammatical issues (it’s/its, their/there/they’re, failure to use apostrophes in contractions, etc.) are likely to be deleted within a few minutes of being uploaded.
  • As there are too many pieces of advice to give for each genre/style of story, authors interested in writing a story should visit the Writing Advice section, as those guides can go more in-depth and be more effective than trying to cover everything here.
  • If in doubt about your story, you should take it to the Writer’s Workshop and visit the Writing Advice section. The former will allow other users to help you troubleshoot and spot issues while the latter will help you with the finer points of your writing.

Questions to Ask Yourself While Writing

  • 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

Why so many standards?
Users have commented repeatedly over the years that they value quality over quantity. We are trying to raise the value of creepypastas and are therefore only accepting stories that authors have put time and dedication into making.
Why can't you go easy on the standards a little bit?
If you randomly select a number of stories on the site, unfortunately, a number of which will not be well-written or will have very generic/cookie-cutter plots that we are still trying to clean up. Going easier on the standards would enable more stories like these to flood the site.
My story got deleted as per these standards. What do I do?
Use Deletion Appeal. And when you do, MAKE SURE you follow the appeal guidelines set forth on the page. We have denied many people just based on the fact that they couldn't follow the directions on how to format their appeal. Also, it is paramount you take it to the Writer's Workshop for help or have a re-worked copy of your story before making the appeal. These stories are deleted for a reason and if you take a moment to look at the deletion appeal, you’ll see direct correlation between appeals where the author has not revised the story and denials. The Workshop has helped many people flatten out the dents in their story. Many of the stories posted there eventually make it to the main site, having improved due to the input the writers got from reviewers.
What do you mean by description?
Put an image in the audience'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. Using too much description can have the same effect.
It's about finding the "as perfect as possible" amount of balance in 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.
Do I have to spell everything correctly in a dialogue area? I want to intentionally misspell a certain character's dialogue.
Sort of. It depends upon the character's dialect. If your character is a US southerner, what words do they commonly mispronounce? "Your" would be acceptable as "Yer", "Get" as "Git", so on and 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. That character's dialect determines whether the intentional misspell is bad, good, or in between.
What do you mean by "must make sense"? Isn't this Creepypasta, where stuff isn't supposed to "make sense"?
The notion of "making sense" refers to the story itself, not its elements. Dogscape is a wonderful story that makes no sense. The setting is made of dog, the plotline is weird, and people do things commonly that we wouldn't even consider. On the other hand, you've got the bad side: Things like this. That's the bad kind of not making sense.
How are these standards enforced?
In a basic variety of ways. If a story has only some mild technical issues - for example, a few misspellings, it's edited/fixed. On the other hand, if it's missing crucial plot points, has a flimsy structure, is excessively bland, etc., it gets deleted.
Really though, these are less like rules and more like guidelines. They only apply if said things heavily detract from the story. While meeting them is important, they are meant for a general idea of why a user's story could get deleted.
There's no rule about stories being "creepy". Is there any kind of guideline to do with unnerving the reader?
Not really. Creepy is more of a subjective term - that is, an opinion. We look at more objective approaches toward the acceptance of a story; if it's good in other ways, we might be willing to overlook a lack of scariness. That being said, a story must have at least some elements of horror or thriller to be accepted onto the site.
Don’t you think it’s unfair to delete another author’s story?
Not at all. Authors should treat their stories like they're a student submitting a report. They should make sure their story/report is well written and without evident errors. This may seem harsh, but authors need to take pride in their work and do their damndest to make sure it shows. If you post a story you wrote in a few minutes, it’s going to show, and readers won't be interested in perusing your other works.

See Also:

Disclaimer

In the event you post via any means a story, page, or blog post about a subject matter that is determined, at an admin's discretion, to be 1) in a highly clichéd genre/category/subject and 2) poorly written, clichéd, generic, or of generally poor quality, then the admins are free at their discretion to delete the page at any time without warning.

This wiki is not responsible or liable for any loss of data or stories that happen on this site for any reason or in any manner they may occur.

IMPORTANT COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Although most content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, not all content falls under this license. Please pay careful attention to the licensing of all stories. We are not responsible for damages, etc. that may arise from mishandling of licensing. When in doubt, contact the author.

Content that is not in the public domain or under a CC0 license must have attribution if used in videos or other media. This is not optional under any other Creative Commons license. That is copyright infringement.

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