Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

Wattpad vs Reality

What the hell, Addy? Where have you been?

Don't y'all judge me. You know I stay busy, but I've got a couple of dead weeks where I'm legally not allowed to work, so here I am! Back and as bad at giving advice as ever. Here I am in all my unedited glory.

Anyway, I got some requests and suggestions and I thought it would be fun to combine some and kill a bunch of birds with one stone. So today, we're going to laugh a little and talk about: Wattpad vs Reality

There is a big push for hyperrealism lately, but at the same time, we have to remember that literature is also one of the best forms of escapism. So I thought it would be fun to point out some clichés on Wattpad that are nothing like what happens in reality. And, of course, you know I wanna talk about those, so let's do this.

1. Hot Guy Always has Abs

This one always gets me, because I feel like it's everywhere. The MC always runs into some dude who is a "brick wall" and he has these awesome washboard abs and I always laugh, because they go on to spend the next two hundred pages never leaving each other's sides and eating junk food.

You all know we're all about acknowledging different body types and celebrating them in all their glory and awesomeness, but c'mon. This one drives me crazy. Lemme spill the same secrets I've been telling everyone forever: you don't have abs if you don't eat right and exercise.

And here's another secret that it seems no one knows. Most of your high school athletes are going to be lanky. They won't have a good muscle mass if they're not eating right as well as working out. And even then, a lot of them just won't have the proper hormone balance to develop the kind of definition they'll see later in life when their body mellows out. It's just science. That's what used to drive the guys I graduated with crazy. It drives the guys I coach now crazy.

You don't get good muscle definition if you're not fueling right. Yeah, you might have some discernable muscle. You might have some definition. You're not going to get washboard abs eating pizza and ice cream. And if you try to claim you have them and you only eat junk food, you're a liar, and I will say that to your face.

I wish more people would consider this when they're writing, because there's a lot of great conflict that comes with this territory. Especially if you want to write a teen fic (which, let's face it, is what 90% of Wattpad stories are). Have you ever spent time with a through and through state champion athlete with college offers out the ass and scouts constantly trying to contact them? Because that's a really, really interesting place to be.

Just from my high school experience, it's a lot of fucking work. And also from my experience, teenagers don't like to eat healthy all the time. Teenagers are always, always, always hungry and if you've ever been athletic, you know that athletes are always, always, always hungry and if you combine those two, it's a recipe for some really great drama.

This time of year always makes me jittery, because June was what my best friend called "fat month", because it was a dead month where coaches weren't really allowed to hold practices (it was state law at the time), so he didn't have to diet. He didn't have to be at the gym all day every day. He could eat whatever, whenever and if he didn't want to roll out of bed at 5 to run with a hangover before hitting the weight room, he didn't have to. Except, he usually just ate Cheetos and didn't go run until 8. That was "bad" for him. He was a pretty disciplined athlete, so he spent a lot of time working out on his own, which is what it takes.

Lately, I've been hanging out with my best friend's dad a lot, because he's hilarious and he was very observant, so he always has some really interesting things to say about what my best friend and I were like growing up. I'm just fascinated by seeing my life and other people's lives through other people's perspectives. Anyway, his whole take on his son being a star athlete was that it really creeped him out, because he'd come home and find my best friend eating carrots while doing situps and watching game film. And as a father of three boys, two of which were bottomless pits that ate enough junk food to single handedly feed a small colony of people, he wasn't sure how to handle the diets.