The Little Story that Could: A Writing Narrative

On March 30, 2012, I was bored. It was a boringly ordinary Friday afternoon after school, and I was sprawled out on the couch with nothing to do. Possibilities bounced around in my head. Should I go for a walk? I was too tired. Should I play some kind of game? I was too lazy. Should I put on something on television? There was nothing interesting. In that moment of indecision, looking around my living room, an idea came burrowing out of the woodwork of my mind and before I knew it, I had a document open and was typing away.

It was this idea that I’d been developing in my head for quite some time. A few months prior, I had discovered creepypasta, horror short stories written on the Internet, and I had fallen in love with it. Like any new discovery of mine, I had invested hours during weekends pouring through story and story, and I had scribbled down idea after idea. With nothing to do on this day, I became determined to pen one of my ideas and join the ranks of the stories I loved. After thirty or forty minutes, “Narration.wmv” was born.

If you’re inspired to go and find the story, let me offer you a warning: “Narration.wmv” is terrible. It’s about a college student who moves to rural New York and has an encounter with the supernatural, finding a mysterious and gore-filled video on a laptop. And I mean, “gore-filled”, with enough blood and guts that would make Quentin Tarentino proud. There’s nothing that creepy or scary in it–just reiterations of blood and guts over and over again. And I more-or-less knew this when I finished writing. I had tried to become famous on the Internet for more than four years prior to this point. Every week between December 2007 and December 2011, I had made a different Youtube video to try and achieve a slice of fame. None of them got more than 300 views, and I closed up shop after receiving biting criticism when I posted a few videos on an Internet forum.

I figured the same thing would happen with “Narration”: a couple of people would leave comments, say it was okay, and that would be it. I figured that that was the amount of attention the story deserved. And, who knows, maybe one or two people would like it. So, without editing the story, I went to the Creepypasta Wikia, a site which houses creepypasta, made an account, and posted “Narration.wmv” for the world to see. I watched the page for a couple of days, but I received no response. I stopped paying attention to it, and I moved on with my life.

Nine months passed. I was chatting with a friend of mine in a chatroom, when he mentioned a well-known creepypasta, “Candle Cove” (that, you should read). Another friend of mine had no idea what he was talking about, and I decided to find it for him. I went on Youtube to an account called “Mr. Creepypasta“, a fairly popular guy who reads creepypasta. I was scrolling through his extensive archive, video after video of stories running by, when something caught my eye.

There, in the middle of the page, was “Narration.wmv”, with 60,000 views on it. My jaw dropped.

The video’s still up today, with almost 140,000 views. Two other people have made their own readings of it, as well. As you’d might expect from a unedited story written in forty minutes, the overwhelming majority of comments on the Youtube pages are negative. Given that it was a story I put almost no effort into, and given that I expected it to go absolutely nowhere, I take no offense to the criticism. It gives me a good laugh when I check it every month or so.

That’s how I sum up my whole experience with “Narration”: a good laugh. After four years of devoting my Fridays and Saturdays to achieving fame on the Internet, I finally got my own tiny slice, coming from something I placed little effort into. I see it as a delicious cosmic joke, and I’ve been enjoying every minute of it.

I haven’t read the story since I wrote it, and I don’t plan to. In the three years since I wrote “Narration,” I’ve moved so far that I don’t see much of myself in that kid back in 2012. Maybe one day, five or ten or so years down the road, I’ll lean back in my chair with my eyes closed, listening to it and remarking about the time gone by. But for now, I’m enjoying what I can from “Narration.wmv,” the little story that could.