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Hello. If you are reading this page, you have come to look for help on writing a page. This guide here to help you through the steps.


STEP 1: MOTIVATION

The first step to writing a level is motivation. If you are writing a level because you feel obligated but you don't really want to, it will turn out terribly. Read some levels, take a break, get inspired. Once you find happiness in writing again, go back to writing. Many people need to remember that we are not obligated to keep pumping out pages. This entire wiki is for the purpose of fun for both the reader and the writer. Remember that every page you make, regardless of whether it's good or bad, deleted or not, increases your writing proficiency.

STEP 2: BRAINSTORMING

Brainstorming is a fairly lengthy process, and arguably the most important factor in page creation. First of all, think back to your childhood. What memories do you vaguely remember? Those can give you themes in creating a level. Dreams that you've had also make amazing level concepts. The best part about these are that they only require a bit of tweaking to create a decent concept. If you can't think of anything, you should most likely move onto images. You could go out in real life and take pictures of anything liminal that you can find, or search keywords under a Creative Commons license. From there, you need to get to work. It starts with the basic truths. Take whatever picture or cue you have, and boil it down to a few adjectives. For instance, I would boil Level 0 down to the following: Yellow, loud fluorescent lights, wet carpet, mold, infinite, mazelike. Those are the basic truths of something, and can be used to amplify or alter other aspects for variety and brainstorming. Now, think about how your basic truths would effect life in this place. Then, make sure your basic concept is not something overdone. If you are doing these concepts, they need something differentiating them from other similar pages.

Now, get into details. How would this place be investigated, what would be in the page, how would the place be entered? Get ready to write these ideas onto paper.

STEP 3: BASIC DRAFT

A draft may or may not have formatting, it does not matter until later. Before you start the page, you may want to include some sort of epigraph or special gimmick. Epigraphs should be italicized. Additional things in the prologue are really up to you to be as creative as you want. Put in a clear boundary (Unless it's just an epigraph), and start the clinical description. This step should normally be first. Descriptions should have some meat on them, but they should not be unnecessary. Each sentence should be working towards furthering the theme.

Redacting text is a viable tactic, but should be used with caution. Text will be redacted if it includes vital information, such as an entrance, but all of the other information is fine. The redacted text will likely be specified later in the page, behind a method of hiding text. Passwords are used as standard concealment against humans, but against entities that can just get past the password often times text will be encrypted.

Writing a description should include a few major factors.

Auditory imagery: What would someone hear when in contact with this thing? Is it important or flavor? If important, it will likely be hammered in for safety purposes.

Visual imagery: What would someone see when in contact with this thing? Also ask yourself if it's important. Remember, not everything is how it meets the eye. Don't be afraid to write down an entirely false description because eyewitnesses were unable to comprehend what they were seeing or only saw part of the thing. Try to clarify later down the line in another page, though.

Olfactory imagery: What would someone smell in this place? Often times, this isn't important enough to mention. However, smells like mold and chemicals can be powerful and somewhat nostalgic. Personally, as the person writing this, I have several specific smells that tie directly to childhood memories and are some of the most impactful forms of nostalgia. The problem is that smells are exceedingly difficult to describe without mentioning a noun which usually shares the same smell. This can often lead to this imagery becoming redundant and losing power. The strongest and most difficult to do imagery, it is not mandatory but pulling it off dramatically helps a level. Otherwise, it can just kind of be tacked on for a bit more flavor.

Tactile imagery: What are the feelings of touching something? This can also come with a large amount of nostalgia, but can really only be described in terms of how rough a texture is and how much friction it generates. This and olfactory are the hardest to pull off.

Gustatory imagery: Nobody's going to be licking the subject of your page in 90% of scenarios, so this is often unrealistic information to add. However, if there is a reason to taste something you have a variety of different descriptive words to describe the taste fairly vividly.


Dialogue should come off reflecting whoever's doing the talking, which can be essential to a reader's understanding. In levels where words are redacted by a third party, the third party will require their own dialogue quirks to set them aside from the rest of the level unless they're smart and just mimic clinical text in which case the reader likely will not realize that they are being lied to and the inconsistencies may just be blamed on your writing quality.

Never repeat the same idea twice unless they're spaced out and you really want to hammer something in. Identify what each sentence is expressing, and if any two are expressing the same thing you should expunge the duplicates. Remember that length does not necessarily make a good level. Length makes a good level IF you can maintain quality over the length. If your description can be written to it's full meaning in two paragraphs and you stretch it out to a four, it doesn't make your page better and you may lose your reader's attention.

Finally, grammar should be standard English grammar except in certain cases. If you wouldn't see it on a professional research paper, you wouldn't see it on most M.E.G pages.

Formatting

Formatting is an important part of any page. Basic text editing is fairly easy. Think of it like salt on food, a little bit of basic text edits will go a long way in improving the page but too much can quickly become oversaturated and decrease the quality. This, of course, does not apply to pages entirely written in a font or style for thematic purposes. Otherwise, regular text should still be your go-to for writing.

Tabbers are a measure of convenience, that should be used once your page is getting too long. They look good under a survival difficulty logo, and they make it so that the reader only has to click once instead of scrolling all the way down to find the next subsection. However, they take away from the overall aesthetic of the page if there is not substantial content under each tabber, meaning levels utilizing them should either make up for it with design or content.

Div tags are useful for more abstractly formatted pages, secrets,logs, and for breaking up smaller amounts of content. While tabbers break up the content into readable but potentially ugly portions, div tags can be used for the same level of convenience with a little less of the aesthetic of tabbers if done right with none of the downsides.

Password protection is used for redacted text in order to get a message across despite the message being potentially dangerous in the main page.

M.E.G notices are usually placed if a page is noteworthy to the M.E.G, which is only in the case of it being in their personal interests.

More complicated things, such as #ifexpr, are often very situational and should be looked for only if a potential situation requires them.

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