Writer Tips

Make your Wattys Story Commercial

What do we mean when we say "Commercial"?

Wattpad is looking for stories that are Immediate, Engaging, and Commercial. But what do we mean by "Commercial"? On Wattpad, "Commercial" means that we are looking for work that is clearly situated within an established genre, and will appeal to fans of that genre. Work that engages with genre can still be complex, deeply felt, and even challenging. No bland characters or cookie cutter plots required.

What is Genre?

Cambridge Dictionary defines genre as "a style, especially in the arts, that involves a particular set of characteristics."

In writing, we can think of genre as a way of categorizing stories based on similarities in writing style, aesthetic, plot, storytelling choices, and other conventions. Genres emerge and change over time–Werewolf Romance, for example, is a relatively recent genre that has emerged as a specific genre in the last 5 or so years. We can call it a genre because it has its own set of distinct conventions and rules that make it distinct from its sister genres like Paranormal Romance or Urban Fantasy.

Genres are shorthands for groupings of characteristics a story might have, and thus are an indicator to the audience of what kind of story they are going to experience.

Genre and Format

Genre can overlap across mediums and formats, or be confined to one format. For example, the romance genre spans books and movies, all of which share the characteristics of centring on the development of a central romantic relationship and ending with an optimistic or happy ending (this is distinct from a romantic drama, which centres the development of a romantic relationship, but does not guarantee a happy ending). Based on the structure of TV series, we don't tend to see romance genre TV, where the show is primarily about the development of a central romantic relationship that ends happily. TV often has romantic subplots in stories that occupy another genre, like drama or sitcom, but we don't see a ton of TV shows that are primarily romances. This is due in part to the history of TV as a format; television favours serialized plots that can run for a long time with no fixed end point. This is antithetical to the romance format, which is predicated on an ending.

Wattpad stories are their own format. Just as novels, plays, TV shows, and movies are all distinct from one another, Wattpad stories are related to many of these formats but not identical to them. It's worth noting that any genre can be adapted into the specific format of a Wattpad story.. Wattpad stories share the most similarity with novels. Both novels and Wattpad stories are (broadly speaking) prose fiction that follow plot events based around a main character or characters. Wattpad differs from traditional prose fiction in that it is usually released in installments (rather than being published all at once, as books usually are) and allows for reader/writer interaction via the comments, which changes how the reader experiences the story.

Wattpad stories also share a lot of overlap with the format conventions of fanfiction, which is a form of non-commercial writing that uses established characters and worlds to tell new stories. We see these overlaps between original Wattpad stories and fanfiction in a tendency to focus on romantic and sexual relationships between characters, a tendency to rely on either known characters (e.g. Bucky Barnes in the MCU) or known character types (e.g. the bad boy in original stories), and a tendency to focus on interpersonal relationships moments and slice-of-life structure over big overarching plots and worldbuilding. This is not to say that all Wattpad stories are like this, or that all fanfiction is like this, just that these two formats share certain overlaps in their approach and execution.

Format shapes what expressions of the genre are available. The most obvious version of this is in visual media vs. written media. The way you tell a story in a primarily visual medium like film, and the way you tell a story in a primarily written medium like a novel or a Wattpad story is very different. Let's return to our romance example. In a romance film, the way the leads look at each other is very important. Staring at each other soulfully is a deeply important part of visual romantic chemistry. It's how the audience knows that romance is happening. But in a written format, a lot of staring between the leads often reads as kind of weird, or boring, or sometimes creepy (e.g. a common charge levelled at Edward Cullen in Twilight is that he stares at Bella too much). Gazing doesn't do the same work in a written format as it does in a visual one, so when we're working in a written format, we need to find other ways of conveying attraction and romantic chemistry beyond gazing.