Hail adventurers! This fine Saturday morning finds you once again in the company of Lord Battle. I awoke early this morning expecting to randomly select another Creepy Pasta and do a quick write-up, but instead I read through several random pastas and a couple selected by genre. This is of course on top of all the comments I read after each story, as for some reason I must always read through the comments and rarely comment myself. It was these comment discussions that inspired me to write about the next couple of pastas. The first story I'm sharing, Outside The Window, is a MicroPasta, which means it takes just a couple minutes at most to read. The second pasta, The Little Wooden Box, is of standard length. Please read both before venturing into the bottom portion.
Outside The Window
Genre: MicroPasta/Horror
Author: N/A
Reading Time: 2-3 minutes
Synopsis: A boy is woken up at 3am by his dog.
Creepiness
(How Scary)
The ending either startled or confused, a 3 seems appropriate.
Pasta Quality
(How Well Written)
This seems like a nit-picky rating to give but sometimes these errors completely pull you out of a story, this happened twice for me during Outside The Window.
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The Little Wooden Box
Genre: Horror
Author: (Credit to) Logan Falk
Reading Time: 15-20 minutes
Synopsis: After a car accident cost a man his left arm, he is prescribed a slew of medication and a little wooden box.
Creepiness
(How Scary)
This story builds very effectively and despite how you feel about the ending, there is surely some imagery left behind with you.
Pasta Quality
(How Well Written)
For how long this one runs I am left with only minor complaints but ones that could have been fixed with a half focused editor.
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| A selection of Comments on "Outside The Window" |
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| A selection of Comments on "The Little Wooden Box" |
The comments above point out a problem with both stories and how they've been structured. Outside The Window is playing with the MicroPasta medium and you can see an example of how much the readers didn't like the ending. Then you have The Little Wooden Box, which takes a much longer form but also clearly loses people at the end. I promise my purpose of writing this isn't to make CreepyPasta readers seem like trolls, but actually the reverse, and I feel if both stories were to swap endings, not literally but in form alone, both would benefit.
An open ending to such a short story can feel like a waste of time. We are already dealing with minimal content so to assume a reader will sit and ponder what is really going on is kind of absurd. I would suggest a strong exploration mark to the short story structure, maybe even one that is very definitive but a bit confusing, in order to force the reader to reread the story.
I.E.: perhaps our protagonist's dad appears and when he learns his son followed his dog out he reminds him that his dog has long passed and he needs to let go of that night. This ending offers a conclusion to the events that occurred but may also inspire readers to reread the story and figure out what is actually haunting our lead.
The Little Wooden Box actually has a very conclusive ending but still left its readers unfulfilled. Now if we were to open the ending up like in Outside The Window, the reader could have some room to project what they took from the content back onto the story.
I.E: let's say we go back to our protagonist as he notices his dad is still in bed. Instead of confronting a ghost and explaining its mythology, he could have awoken his parents to show them the entity downstairs. Upon arrival, it's of course gone and the TV off. This sparks another fight between the boy and his dad but this time the boy runs up and grabs the box and chucks it out of his parents bedroom window. Their relationship will never be the same but with a cleaver time-laps wrap-up the story could end on a psychological vs paranormal note, hell maybe even some words about how this could happen to anyone. The point is we have enough content to make some fairly educated guesses on what might happen after the story concludes.
This was a strange wrap-up for me, as I normally like to discuss story elements, themes, or characters, not structure. So if you feel the need to discuss anything further about these or any previous stories, please get in touch. Email, Instagram, or commenting below all work!
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