How to Write a Creepypasta: A Practical Guide from the Daily Creepypasta Editors

A creepypasta is a horror story written to be read on a screen, usually in one sitting, and usually told as if it really happened. (Our explainer, What Is a Creepypasta?, covers the word and where it came from.) The form looks simple, and in a sense it is: one narrator, one strange thing, a few thousand words. That simplicity is also what makes it hard. There’s nowhere to hide a weak idea, and readers who have read a hundred of these will spot a borrowed one quickly.

What follows is the advice we’d give anyone sending us a story. None of it is a rule. Plenty of good stories break every point here. But if a draft isn’t working, the problem is usually somewhere on this list.

1. Start with one wrong thing

Most good creepypastas grow out of a single detail that is wrong in a specific, concrete way. Not “something evil lives in the woods” but something you could photograph or measure. Our originals show the pattern:

Someone is eating exactly half of everything in the narrator’s apartment, down to half of one grape (Halves).
A grocery list on the fridge keeps getting new items, in the narrator’s own handwriting (Corrections).
A grandfather’s handwritten tide tables are accurate to the minute, and have a third column (The Tide Tables).
A reservoir freezes solid in a July heat wave, and under the ice the lights of the drowned town are on (July Ice).

Notice how small most of these are. The wrong thing doesn’t have to be a monster. It only has to be impossible, or nearly so, and simple enough to explain in a sentence. If you can’t say what’s wrong in one line, the story probably hasn’t found its center yet.

A useful test: can you picture the moment the narrator first notices it? If you can, that moment is probably your opening.

2. Give the narrator a real life

The strange thing is only frightening if it intrudes on something ordinary, and the ordinary part is where most first drafts are thinnest. Give the narrator a job, a place and a routine, and get the details right.

Jobs are especially useful because they come with procedures, vocabulary and a reason to be somewhere at 3 a.m. A wildlife biologist counting elk from a helicopter with a thermal camera (Thermal), a records-warehouse worker with two hundred thousand barcoded boxes (Retention Schedule), a Bering Sea crabber (Pot Forty-One), a paperboy with an envelope of coins on a porch rail every Friday (Route Fourteen): in each case the work gives the story its texture and the narrator a reason not to leave.

If you’re writing about a job you’ve never done, research it. Readers who have done that job will notice, and the specific detail (what the warehouse smells like, what the dispatcher says on the radio) does more for credibility than any amount of insisting that “this really happened.”

Places work the same way. A real town, a real highway, a real kind of weather. Vague settings produce vague fear.

3. Write the first line last

The first line of a creepypasta has one job: to get the wrong thing, or the promise of it, in front of the reader at once. Readers online will leave after a paragraph if nothing has happened.

Many strong openings simply state the situation plainly:

Someone has been eating exactly half of everything in my apartment.

You don’t need a hook in the advertising sense, and you don’t need to start with screaming. You need a clear, specific sentence the reader can’t quite accept. It’s often easiest to write the whole draft first and then come back to the opening once you know what the story is really about. Very often the best first line is buried in your third or fourth paragraph.

Things to avoid in openings: long introductions about yourself, apologies (“I don’t know if anyone will believe me”), weather unless it matters, and promises that you’re about to tell the scariest story ever. Each one delays the moment the reader gets hooked.

4. Choose your format on purpose

A creepypasta can be a straight first-person account, but it can also be a list of rules, an email thread, a logbook, an inspection report or a set of voicemails. Our guide to rules horror and found-document horror goes into these in depth. The short version:

Use a document when the document can’t react. An HOA’s minutes, an estate inventory, an audio tour script (Self-Guided Tour) are all written in a calm, official voice, and the horror comes from that voice recording things it has no words for.
Use rules when the rules tell a story. A good rules list starts mundane, introduces one rule that doesn’t make sense, and ends with the reader understanding what the rules are protecting against.
Stay in character. If it’s an email, it has to read like an email. Real people don’t describe their feelings in full paragraphs in a work thread, and a logbook doesn’t explain things the logkeeper already knows.

If you can’t say why your story is in a particular format, tell it straight.

5. Escalate in steps

Most creepypastas follow a shape you can sketch on a napkin: the wrong thing appears, the narrator explains it away, it happens again in a way that can’t be explained away, the narrator tests it or investigates, and the test makes things worse.

Each step should be more specific than the last, not just louder. In a good story, the second incident isn’t simply bigger than the first. It tells the narrator, and the reader, something new about what’s happening. In Halves, the narrator weighs everything. Testing the strange thing is one of the most reliable engines in the form, because a test produces a result, and a bad result is worse than an unexplained event.

Keep the narrator’s reactions believable. People rationalize, delay, tell themselves they’re tired, and keep going to work. A narrator who acts sensibly and still can’t escape is scarier than one who makes foolish choices for the plot’s convenience.

6. Explain less than you know

Before you write, you should know what’s going on: what the third column in the tide tables means, who’s adding to the grocery list. Then leave most of it out.

The reader’s imagination will always do better than your explanation. The classics understood this. M. R. James, whose stories we publish, kept his ghosts at the edge of the frame, and his best moments are glimpses, like the “face of crumpled linen” rising from an empty bed in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. (Our guide to James and his circle has more on his methods.) A creepypasta that ends with a full explanation of the entity’s origin, powers and rules tends to turn horror into lore.

A useful rule of thumb: explain the how of an event in detail and the why barely at all.

7. Land the ending, then stop

Endings are where most drafts go wrong, usually in one of three ways:

The ending explains everything. See above.
The ending is a twist for its own sake. “And then I realized I was the ghost” has been done thousands of times, and it rarely changes the meaning of what came before.
The ending keeps going. The story reaches its strongest image, and then the narrator adds three paragraphs of reflection, a warning to the reader, and a promise of updates.

The best endings tend to be either a final turn of the screw, a last detail that makes everything that came before it worse, or a quiet return to the ordinary with the wrong thing still there. Try deleting your last paragraph. Often the story is better without it. Then try deleting the paragraph before that.

8. Earn the “true story” frame

Creepypasta grew up pretending to be real, and the first-person “this happened to me” frame is still the form’s default. It works best when you commit to it quietly. Specific, unremarkable details (a date, a street name, what the narrator had for lunch) do more to sell a story as true than claims that it’s true. Overstatement, such as all-caps warnings, “please share this” or “I don’t have much time,” tends to break the spell for experienced readers.

If you’re submitting to us, write the story the way it needs to be written. We publish it as fiction either way.

9. Revise for the screen

People read creepypasta on phones, often late at night. A few practical habits help:

Keep paragraphs short. A wall of text on a phone is a reason to stop reading. Use a long paragraph only when you want the reader to feel trapped in it.
Cut filler. Lines like “I’ll never forget that night” or “little did I know” add words without adding fear.
Read it aloud. Creepypasta is often narrated aloud online. If a sentence trips you up when spoken, it will trip up readers too.
Check names, dates and places. If the story says the narrator moved in in March and later mentions “last summer in the apartment,” readers will notice.
Let it sit. A day or two away from a draft makes it much easier to see which paragraphs are doing the work.

On length, there’s no right answer. The shortest story on the site runs under 600 words, and the longest classics run past 25,000. Our own originals mostly fall between about 900 and 2,200 words, which is long enough to build a life for the narrator and short enough to read in one sitting.

10. Make it yours

The fastest way to get a story turned down, here or anywhere, is to retell a story the reader already knows. The classics of the form, from Slender Man to Candle Cove, are worth reading to understand how they work. (Our short history of creepypasta covers the big ones.) Don’t copy them, and don’t write fan fiction set in someone else’s world. The wrong detail that only you would have noticed, in a place only you know well, is worth more than another tall, faceless figure in the trees.

The same goes for tools. Write the story yourself. Our guidelines don’t accept AI-generated work passed off as the author’s own, and in practice the specific, lived-in details that make a creepypasta work are exactly what generated text tends to lack.

A short checklist before you submit

Can you say what’s wrong in one sentence?
Does the first paragraph put it in front of the reader?
Does the narrator have a job, a place and a routine that feel real?
Does each incident tell us something new, not just something louder?
Have you cut the explanation down to the minimum?
Have you tried deleting the last paragraph?
Is the story entirely your own, with no copyrighted characters or real, identifiable people?

Send us your story

If you’ve written something that belongs here, we’d like to read it. Every submission is read by a person. Before sending, please read our submission guidelines, which cover length (500 to 20,000 words), what we don’t accept, and the license you give us (you keep your copyright). When you’re ready, use the submission form.