Biggest Wattpad Pet Peeves

A Broken Hook

First of all, hi! I'm back! Hopefully!

So basically I am on summer break now. So, with any luck, I can be as active on Wattpad as I once was. Here's hoping. I won't make any promises, but I really want to be active again, so I'll try my best, at least during the summer!

Yeesh. After going through my senior year, I kind of empathize with the people who disappear from Wattpad for long periods of time. This year was crazy. I did try to (sort of) keep you updated on where I was and how long I'd be gone, but... I know I've hardly been on since senior year started. I'm not going to delete any of my old rants, but I do feel slightly less judgmental of those people now that I (sort of) became one of them. Slightly. Of course, it's a totally different matter when I do it than when they do it. To me, anyway.

Now, on to the ranty portion of this update.

You'll hopefully remember back when I was talking about the hook and the bait many many rants ago? Recap: the bait was the title and cover, and the hook was the description. (Yes, I had to go review that chapter because it was so long ago and my memory is horrible. So I forgive you if you'd forgotten already.) Well, I'm extending the definition of the hook to include the beginning of the story, like maybe the first chapter or so. If the first chapter doesn't pull you in, you're not gonna keep reading, right? I mean, sometimes, you'll be generous and give it a little more time to see if the rest of the book is miraculously better than the beginning. And what do you know? Sometimes it really is! But usually... it's not.

More specifically, let's talk about the opening line. That's what gives you your first impression of a book, and that's what I'm focusing on in this lovely rant.

The point is, sometimes authors have a really awesome intro. (Can I take a moment to complain about how much I hate autocorrect as I try to type in the wattpad app? Alright, thank you. I've gotten that out of my system now. You're welcome for fixing all the autocorrect errors instead of trying to make you struggle through them. Actually, that could be sort of fun... Ahem. Moving on.) And on the other side of the spectrum, sometimes authors have unbelievably horrible intros. Let's discuss this.

Now before we start, I need to be totally honest with you. I've made a list of things to rant on, adding to it as I see things on Wattpad that irk me, and the next one up said "Lame Beginnings."

...

Without any explanation like I had written for some of the other ones.

...

And I had no idea what I meant by that, so I'm kind of making this up as I go along. I mean, I made an educated guess - I know some stories definitely have "lame beginnings" - but it's been so long since I've been on Wattpad that I can't remember exactly what irked me in the first place. So I totally made my examples up. Most, if not all of them, I may not have ever seen in real Wattpad books. But I'm having fun writing it after being gone for so long. It can be a sort of warm-up before for me before I get to a more serious issue. And who knows? If someone somewhere ever decided that one of them was a good idea for their story, then this rant would become super relevant! If I do ever remember specific examples, I'll tweak them a little (to protect privacy) and add them in. So now that you've been warned, let's continue.

First of all, there are the unbelievably boring intros:

Hi, I'm Bob! I am 17 and 1/2 years old and attend BlahBlah High School. I have sandy hair and blue -

NO. I'm pretty sure we had the in-story character sketch discussion, like, last rant. What makes you think it's okay to use it as your intro? In general, "Hi, I'm ____!" is not a super great way to start a book.