It took a few hours, but I put something together. It was one or the other, so why not take the path of most resistance? What’s the risk? If it tanks, I can just delete the account and pretend the whole affair had been a bad dream about some other dude with no talent.

I wasn’t posting comments, and I didn’t have a story to contribute. These were just people telling tales, and as long as they at least flirted with believability, everyone would have a good time.Īfter a few weeks, I started to feel like a freeloader. The stories were presented with the kind of informal air you might find at a bar when some weirdo starts telling you things you don’t really want to hear about. I read an interview with comicbook author Garth Ennis a while back where he said that you’re never shooting for realism – it’s believability that you’re after. NoSleep was pretty raw back then, and a lot of the stories did seem real. So, be nice and play along in the comments. So, don’t write a story where it turns out that you, the narrator, have been the ghost of an alien the whole time. It wasn’t quite the Mothman or Bigfoot, but it was spreading – I hadn’t written a creepypasta, but it was becoming one anyway, something passed around the world’s largest campfire.

“Everything is true, even if it isn’t.” Absolutely killer idea with only two real rules at the time. The framework was simple: amateur authors would post stories and readers would play along. In 2011, I was just beginning my crippling addiction to Reddit when I found my way to a then small sub called NoSleep. Behold: copy/paste => copypasta => creepypasta. Creepypastas are modern kinds of urban legends – unattributed scary stories that get copied and pasted around the internet. Strictly speaking, and for the satisfaction of category nerds the world over, I didn’t write a creepypasta. Instead, what I want to do is talk to you about how I came to trace this route in the hopes that if I can’t offer you a roadmap, you at least might find some useful waypoints along the way. I think you could go in any order or dodge any step each has different merits, but I’m not sure there would be much worth in trying to measure them against one another here. Weird.Ĭreepypasta to self-publishing to Doubleday.

This August, my second book drops from the massive machine of Doubleday and Blumhouse Books. I wanted to write a single short story for some internet pals.

Penpal creepypasta book