Advice - In The Form Of Rants

Age Appropiate?

[Thank you so much for 3k! We appreciate all the support!]

Bro.

We all know that we all know that everything on Wattpad is pure gold, orgasmic material, right?

Of course not. You couldn't have competition if everyone's equal. If that were true, communism wouldn't look as stupid.

Back to the initial topic.

What is appropiate on Wattpad?

Well, if you've been lucky enough to journey to the darkest corners of Wattpad (I'm talking books of nudes (like actual ones), pornography books (filled with porn gifs and photos) and books that encourage/ promote/ romantisise suicide, anorexia and far worse), then you'd be aware that everything is. Despite the fact that they have literally have an entire page dedicated to what you can and can't post.

They'll happily move a popular teen fiction book for being in the wrong genre or take down an account for a harsh review (okay, I'm holding a grudge), yet they do almost nothing about that part of the website. I can be as annoyed as I want, but that won't change anything.

How strange.

But, we need to get back on topic. This is about what is and isn't appropiate for your audience.

Whether or not you measure your audience by genre/subgenre or demographic, it is very important to know what is appropiate to write. If you don't, you'll lose readers and worse.

If you're writing for an audience for all ages, you have what I call partial freedom.

Partial freedom - To me, this is when you have the freedom to explore the following:

Friendship
Stakes
Coming of age (to a degree)
Family
Love

But, all at a fundamental level. For example, when talking about friendship, you can talk about betrayal. But, it shouldn't be anything that can go further than bullying.

Next, I'd call 14-15 and above. You can go a little more wild with this. This is limited freedom. The themes you can explore include the following:

Friendship
Loneliness
Stakes
Coming of age - growing up
Family
Change
Love (you can go into the more sexual part of it)
Experimentation
New experiences
Bullying
Betrayal

You can most certainly explore these ideas in a lot more in depth. Because your audience is older, they'll be able to handle far more. You should be more experimental here, but you cannot under any grounds, step too far into an older age group.

For young adults (18+), you can go all in. I'll call this complete freedom.

The reason why is simple: your audience should be able to take anything at that age. There aren't really any topics you can't talk about.

Friendship
Loneliness
Stakes
Coming of age - growing up
Family
Change
Love (you can go into the more sexual part of it)
Experimentation
New experiences
Bullying
Betrayal
Sex
Taboo (incest, suicide, prostitution and more)
Abuse (physical, drug, alcohol, emotional... you name it.)

But!

Despite that, there are things that are inappropiate. For example, you still need to be mindful of the genre you're in. But, that rant is for another day.