For The Love Of Writing

Why Your Book Sucks Pt. 1

It's a new year for us my fellow Wattpadians and boy am I feeling excited. 

It's time for some of you to accept the error of your ways. To just accept that although you may have had a great idea for a story, you completely butchered the execution of it. Accept that you just didn't know how to write it and we can work through this together. 

We've talked about a few different things in the making of this book so far. We've touched on plot, engagement,  structure, etc. and there doesn't seem to be any confusion. Well lads, tonight is the night where we begin talking about your style of writing. And correcting someone's writing style is one of the harder issues for people to consume. So if you're one of the types of people who I will be describing in this part, don't feel offended. 

I'm only here to help. 

Your style of writing is going to be either the biggest turn off or turn on for a reader. It's the voice that you choose to have as an author or even the voice that you choose to give to your characters. Regardless of whether or not it's portrayed through dialogue or just the way that things are thought from a character's point of view, your style shows up in many different ways. 

Let's start off with the beginning of your story. And let's assume that the story we're looking is going be a pretty basic 'teenager in high school' drama. Now most of these stories, which seem to make up the majority of Wattpad, start off the same stereotypically annoying way. What might this way be you might ask?

With an alarm clock going off. 

There's only one thing worse than the beginning of a story being: "BEEP. BEEP. BEEP." And that would be with the character immediately introducing themselves within the dialogue that's supposed to be in their head. So instead of setting the scene or actually trying to draw the reader in, you basically end up writing an essay about the character from the character's point of view that the reader doesn't need at all. It looks a little something like this:

"Hi! My name is Moriah and I'm an awfully boring writer on Wattpad who is now going to proceed to tell you everything about my life so that you decide not to read about me any further. On top of that I'm going to then detail every point of my morning to you followed by me describing every single friend or person I've ever known before within one paragraph."

As soon as I click on a story and the first few words are "My name is..." then I immediately click out of it. Because that tells me a few obvious things about the author. First of all, that shows that they're lazy. So lazy that they couldn't think of a way to introduce their character to their readers without having them directly speak to the reader, basically skipping over first person and jumping into second person, and did it in the most cliche way possible. This shows me right off the bat that I'm getting a story that's going to be full of lazy writing that is eventually going to lead to an even lazier ending. 

Secondly it shows me that there's absolutely no uniqueness to the story. I've found that starting a story in the middle of a scene with no background information is often the most useful. Start them in the middle of the chaos and then later on in the story go back to the roots of what the real problem is. If your character is in high school then maybe try not to start the day off with them at home getting ready for school. Maybe try starting it with them already halfway through the day so that we can meet the round and flat characters (main and not-so-main characters) without having to go through the grueling process of them walking us through a school day that doesn't matter in the beginning of the story. More often than not in these high school books the climaxes of the stories don't even happen at the high school.