Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

A Wattpad History

I don't think you'll find any particularly wise advice in this chapter. Instead, this is more a recount of my experiences, because I think by showing my experiences, you'll be able to relate. If at the end of the day, even a single person who reads this realizes they've been through something similar, and feel relieved that they're not the only one, then I feel this chapter has done its job.

Many of the readers who follow me do so mostly because of Wattpad 101. In fact, I'd go so far to say that most people follow me because of 1 specific chapter of Wattpad 101. That chapter is "How Long should my chapter be?" As I understand it, when this particular question is asked on google, my wattpad chapter pops up on top of the menu, and I think that's brought more people to my book than anything else I have written.

It certainly wasn't the first chapter I've written, but considering it has 3 times the views, a hundred more stars, and 200 more comments than the first chapter of this book, it should become clear just how influential the 22nd finished chapter in my book happened to be. I lucked out and just happened to hit the right phrasing to achieve google gold.

However, the thing that brought my account from a nobody to a nobody with 1200 followers didn't start with Wattpad 101 at all. It actually spawned from a oneshot fiction I wrote called Vampire's Kiss. It was intended to be a short story aimed at entering the Wattys, but that year they decided to redefine the short story to something with about 6 times the amount of words I was expecting, and so that never happened.

But... through some strange luck, the story started getting REALLY popular and *gasp* featured! I did what people do when you strike gold. You dig in. I started writing chapters of Vampire's Kiss, turning a one-shot into a complex story with various characters. However, the story was derivative, romantic drivel... and I had no fun writing it. So even though the story exploded with reads, follows, and stars... after about 10 chapters I had enough and couldn't keep going on with a story that wasn't fun to write.

Thus, I axed the story and returned it back to its oneshot roots, and my goldmine story was lost to the ravages of time.

Around this time, I also was quite prevalent in the Wattpad forums, and thus I created the Mission Impossible Club. It was a club that took 20+ volunteer writers, created a chapter to chapter script, and got each writer to write one chapter of a story. The first story generated a lot of excitement. The second one was less. And by the third one I couldn't get anyone barking.

It was a hard job, but I managed to get 2 completed novels from it. You can still find them on wattpad if you search mission impossible. I've thought about closing out that account and just bringing them over to my profile, but I never felt like the work was really "mine".

The biggest thing that came out of the Mission Impossible club, however, was Wattpad 101. That's write. After shoveling through 20-30 writers unedited stories and trying to turn what they wrote into something coherent, I started writing this guide as a resource both for myself and for other writers. In fact, the seven sins of wattpad and writing dialogue where the first two chapters I ever wrote for MI long before they became Wattpad 101 chapters... and they did NOT go over well. Apparently, my authors got "offended" when I tried to give them advice on what I felt they were doing wrong.

Either way, that lead to Hawtness. My first "completed" book and the only other one in my profile that seems to have any real presence.

The book was written because it was fun to write. Unlike Vampire's Kiss, I enjoyed the satire and the humor. I also got about 2-3 people who commented on every chapter, and that, more than anything, made my ability to go through and complete Hawtness a reality.