I promise to always deliver the very best in Wattpad romance. Your supportive comments always inspire me, and you sweet lovebirds out there are going to love the next installment in my Gopher/Shifter series:
MINORITY MURDER TRAIN VOL VII. The heartbreaker's guide to relentless slaughter and crowd control during the bloodiest of ethnic massacres... teehee!
Yeah, so we have a major problem here. And by here, I mean with this series of chapters I've been running. No problem with minorities... If you have time to complain about that, you have time to start building that wall.
Uh oh, a meta sin? We don't care about your life! We want more dated references!
I hear that. But this is one that I need to get out of the way, because it has impacted all of my current projects. In a way, all of these chapters are meta; I find something crappy about Wattpad, and then jump on here to whine about it. Every sin on here, I've probably committed myself at some point or another.
To talk about scope, we need to define it as 'the writer's intention'. If you start any story, you have a tangible concept in front of you, an ideal product to be completed. Our problem begins when that scope grows in size, changes shape, becomes indistinguishable from what it was first pictured to be.
I love this non-fiction series. I do, it brings me endless joy to have a platform where the sole premise is to recycle all of the negativity on Wattpad, condense it into warnings and pro tips.
My problem, personally, is that I wanted to do so much more on here.
We like having more stuff! Why not post those things anyway?
Put simply, it wouldn't be 'Wattpad Sins' anymore if I did. Just by looking back at some of the previous chapters, you can see where it starts to change. I made a whole chapter about coping with depression (lolwut), and another that was blatantly about Kindle instead of Wattpad!
Amateurish, I know. As a writer, a person who expresses themselves through words, I just couldn't help but share what was going on in my life. And this story here? It's not the proper place for any of that nonsense. I apologise.
You could create another book for those topics.
Maybe that could work, but it wouldn't be worth my time. I would absolutely love a platform that lets me spew out my passions and beliefs, a soapbox to stand on and let myself and other users have their say about difficult topics.
Would that type of poetry/misc story be as popular as this one? Very unlikely. My opinions aren't part of the scope that my demographic are demanding, which is why I should be doing a better job of separating the two.
Do people click on this story to be lectured about writing techniques? No! They want to see actual sins, those little annoyances that plague the very worst of Wattpad stories. They want to learn through seeing bad examples, not be force-fed the dramatic principles of Chekhov's Gun!
Yeah, you do kinda have a boner for literary concepts.
And that's okay! My need for recognition can be satisfied elsewhere, but not on a platform I've already established as a satire zone for poking fun.
The thing is, I didn't start this topic to roast myself. Scope creeping (the official term) is a real problem, and one that could affect any Wattpad story.
Just like my example at the top shows, how would you feel if your favourite werewolf romance series 'shifted' into a bloodthirsty propaganda piece on ethnic cleansing? Not so steamy now, is it?
As an author, you might grow tired of writing towards your idealised concept. Everyone can feel limited from time to time, and you might want to break out of the mold you've set. That isn't always a bad thing, but when your readers expect one product and you deliver another genre entirely?
That is a pitfall, and one that anyone can fall into. Say that a mysterious kidnapping in your detective novel is explained by extraterrestrials; now your series is about space and aliens. What would your crime-loving fans think of having the rug pulled out from under their feet, all because you wanted it to be more science-fiction?
Keep an eye on your scope, kids. Go into every project with simplicity in mind, and even if that vision changes? Stay closer to the original. It's much easier to go straight through a tunnel, than to try and turn it around.
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You got all philosophical again... That's what started this whole mess.
A little bit of pedantism is okay, I guess. What's not okay, is letting your boredom control the direction of your writing. It should be the opposite, always and forever.
I'm not saying that your scope cannot evolve, or change into a shape that is better than the original outcome. But if you let it slide too much, it's easy to become disillusioned with what you have already wrote, and that feeling of wasted time is a complete story-killer.
Speaking from experience, I've written so many chapters for Wattpad Sins in the past month... and deleted them, because they weren't actually 'Wattpad Sins'. I don't want this space to deviate from the current goal, which is to hit 70 unforgivable sins. A bold claim, which I will strive to achieve.
I like it here too, but for real... Can we still get that soapbox of yours? Pretty please?
We'll talk ;)