Mortos is a longtime SCP writer who achieved an iconic success with his SCP-3008 entry. These are his thoughts on containment procedure in SCP fiction writing.

Were the containment procedures written closer to the start or the end of SCP-3008’s development?

Mortos: The containment procedures were written at the start, and then tweaked to accommodate any changes needed after writing the rest of the article. This is usually how I write all my containment procedures.

What was your thought process in writing the procedures, how did you want to use them in the larger context of SCP-3008 as a whole?

Mortos: For me, containment procedures need to accomplish two main goals. They need to make logical sense in actually containing the anomaly safely (and not have any glaring holes), and they need to serve as kind of a teaser for what is to come in the article. I generally try to keep them fairly minimalist too, which can sometimes make maintaining that first goal a little tricky. Ultimately, they need to set some kind of expectation in the reader, which as a writer you can then fulfil or subvert.

Did the ConProcs change much during the writing process?

Mortos: No, I don’t think so. Beyond some minor wording tweaks I think they were pretty much the same throughout. At its core 3008 isn’t especially complex, so I knew up front more or less what the procedures would be.

How do you approach containment in your SCP Wiki writing and has that approach changed over time?

Mortos: I’ve definitely made an effort to make my conprocs more interesting as time has gone on. Playing up certain aspects of articles and using slightly over-dramatic wording to describe them has been a way of adding a sense of weight to the procedures that I started using at some point. Otherwise though, I’ve more or less tried to maintain my approach of having them make logical sense and teasing the reader.

What makes containment procedures work, and how can they go wrong?

Mortos: There are lots of things that can make a containment procedures work, depending on the needs of the article. “Containment porn” can be a way of establishing the magnitude or danger of the object being written about, though for most articles I think less is generally more. There’s no one specific way to make your conprocs work, as long as they have something for the reader to engage with. The easiest way for conprocs to go wrong, beyond just making no sense, is to start falling back on old Series 1 tropes. Specifying the exact measurements of your humanoid containment cell along with every piece of furniture they need and how many times a day they are allowed to wander around your secure facility is a good way to tell your reader that you haven’t read an article outside of Series 1.

When reading contemporary SCP articles, how would you describe the most common approaches to writing containment procedures?

Mortos: Short, concise containment procedures seem to be the most common way of doing it these days, which is definitely something I approve of. Trimming a way a lot of the excess fluff and boiling them down to specific points about that object seems to have become the norm. There’s a lot less specifying extra details that would just be part of standard Foundation operating procedures (researcher level restrictions, who can and can’t access an anomaly, that sort of thing).

Do you view containment procedures as an integral part of the SCP writing process, and integral to your enjoyment as a reader?

Mortos: I wouldn’t say they are integral to the writing process, but they do help. For me personally, the containment procedures help me get into the right headspace for writing, one of a formal Foundation researcher who knows that lives might depend on the information being put into that document. I do think they are integral to the format, though. They add an air of weight and formality to an article that, I believe, is one of the reasons the wiki has become so popular.

Are containment procedures written differently now than they were when you first began writing for the SCP Wiki?

Mortos: I started writing at the very start of series 4 (I rejoined the community during the SCP-3000 contest after a ~4 year hiatus, and I’d only really written one draft before that), so containment procedures haven’t really changed much since I started writing; a lot of the big changes moving away from Series 1-style conprocs had already happened long before my first article was posted. As I mentioned before, I think they have become a bit more concise since I started, but that’s about it.

Speculatively, what is the future of containment procedure writing on the SCP Wiki?

Mortos: It’s hard to imagine any massive changes occurring at this point, though things like the Anomaly Classification System might be made official in a future iteration of the wiki and become rolled in to what we consider as Containment Procedures. The range of things you can do with conprocs is already so broad though that I think anyone would struggle to say “X is the future of con procs” without being proven wrong the next day.

What’s your analysis of SCP-173’s containment procedures?

Mortos: They get the job done, I guess, though by contemporary standards they are massively lacking and designed to make 173 seem more dangerous than it really is. Given the nature of what SCP-173 is as an article, you can’t really fault it for that – there’s no way the author could have known everything that would follow – but they don’t really hold up to the kind of scrutiny articles get these days. Beyond being logically flawed, repeated words and phrases make the whole section slightly clunky to read, and it is missing a single key piece of information; does viewing it through a camera cause it to stop moving? If it was written today, 173’s containment procedures would be as simple as sealing it in a box with a grated floor and having an automated sprinkler hose it down once a day. There’s no reason for anyone to ever enter that box.