quarantine 'em

So in the Antimemetics Division stories I've mentioned a few SCPs in the 4XXX range and I mainly used that range because I wasn't expecting to have to write them up for at least a few years, if ever

In general the reason I chose a "distant" number, rather than choosing an available number and writing up an actual SCP entry, was that an SCP entry would have been significantly less entertaining than the story and/or largely redundant in light of the story

Telling a story through the highly constrained format of the Special Containment Procedures template is not at all easy. Many people use the "escape hatch" of interviews and testing logs to try to get back to something more like a conventional narrative

Just the constraint of putting containment procedures first, description second is tough to deal with. Those procedures, if stated directly, often give away the "ending". They're the first thing the reader reads but they're difficult to bend into the shape of a good hook

Contrast with a conventional narrative where you do anything you like. Sort the facts to be revealed into the order of maximum drama and go from there. Describe things in a non-clinical manner. Twist the ending

So, for example, SCP-4051 (as described in http://www.scp-wiki.net/fresh-hell ) is a disused hospital wing filled entirely with severed fingers. This is not a very interesting SCP at all, really

(Potentially, it could be coerced into a fascinating, grisly SCP writeup. We don't know its full backstory; I never worked all of that out. But potentially, this is true of everything. At face value there's not a lot to go on. No kick)

But SCP-4051 wasn't constructed to serve as an interesting SCP entry. It was constructed to serve as an intense environment in which one character would meet another character. It was constructed to help reveal those characters, and have them, then, go somewhere. As it were