Wattpad Pet Peeves

Unexperienced Writer Issues (+ a bunch of announcements)

Oh boy. It's been a while. 

But we'll get to the personal stuff after I get through the meat and potatoes of this chapter. 

UNEXPERIENCED WRITER ISSUES

When learning how to write stories, it's important that the audience is actually able to understand what's going on. Sounds simple, right? However, this gets a little bit harder to put into practice when actually sitting down to write the story. Turns out, there's a barrier between what we see in our minds when we write, and what actually gets put down on the paper. What I mean is, there have been many a time when I've come across a book that had a lot of potential. The outline of the plot seemed promising, and maybe the characters were good too. However, when reading the story it was hard to keep up with what was going on. The author simply left out lots of details. But I just had this sense that the author had this great story laid out in their head, and the writing may have made sense to them, but they didn't think about whether it would make sense to other people. Here are some broad examples of this kind of thing:

Characters are introduced very briefly, so brief that the audience doesn't know what the character's role is. 

Not learning what a character even looks like until over half way through the story. 

Scenes that start at very awkward points (almost as if we joined in the middle of the scene and missed important details).

Important details about characters that we don't learn until very late into the story, or that we don't even learn at all.

Important details about the setting that go unmentioned (ex: most sci-fi books that forget to world build).

Important details about the genre that go unmentioned. 

These issues are often created when the writer assumes the audience knows more about their story than they do in reality. This can easily be prevented if the author carefully proofreads, or better yet, has someone else proofread for them. Otherwise, readers will be very confused trying to juggle the plot elements that you keep dropping. 

AUTHOR'S NOTE TIME

Where have I been?

I had some burnout with this book. At the time that I'm writing this, it's still not very popular, and that really got to me a few months ago when I discontinued this. However, it's not about the read count anymore. I just want to get my ideas out. I've also been juggling school and work, and this book got pushed into the background. But I've still been reading Wattpad this whole time. What actually inspired me to get back on this horse was that I started keeping a reading log of everything I read this past year. Most of it was Wattpad, but I also recently read a professionally published book. Finishing that book and coming back to Wattpad was what reminded me of just how many pet peeves I still need to write about. I also think I've improved as a writer myself (thanks to English classes), so I want to flex my skills. 

Where am I going?

I'm not going to take this book as seriously anymore. What I mean is, I'm going to get rid of the official update schedule, and just update whenever I want. So don't be surprised if there's some inconsistency. If I get burnt out again, I'll try to be transparent about it. Also, I was originally planning to have seasonal covers and change them throughout the year, but I've scrapped this because it's too much to keep track of. I'll just keep the original cover, which is rather fall themed, but that's fine because there's some overlap between the writing aesthetic and the fall aesthetic in my opinion. 

If you read all the way to the end of this chapter, thank you for bearing with me. :)