Pointers for Story Lines

Oops, I dropped your book

As readers and wattpadders, we have always had a tryst with that particular book that makes us gag, roll our eyes, and almost drop it midway. Key Word: Almost.

If everyone would drop that book, Wattpad wouldn't be infected with 'cliché-itis'. But sadly, there's no cure for this viral disease as people continue reading those books and the authors end up being famous.

We all know it when we read those lines:

"Their tongues battled for dominance" (in almost every first kiss in a teen fiction.)

"He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding" (this one is like filling a form in general quota. You know you will have to face this line, no matter what genre you read.)

Then there are those moments when the girl in a novel cryptically says,' Oh that boy is cute but I'm still going to fight with him throughout the novel and declare our love in the last chapter because the writer was kinda bored with her life'

... Yada yada. The list goes on.

Now, when you decide that you want to write a novel, you recall your experience as a reader and usually have two conflicting thoughts.

1. Should I write a cliché to be famous?

2. Should I write a book that can only be read by art critics, or linguistic scholars?

The decision isn't hard to make. Most go for the cliché.

There is a very fine line between the definition of cliché and creative. I could write a cliché high school romance from the point of view of the school headmaster's pet Pug. Now a teen romance from the perspective of a dog doesn't stay in the cliché category anymore, no matter how common the actual romance is. This isn't cliché. This is creative. Look, this is an example of how you could turn the most cliché ideas into something that is far better, and stands out from the crowd to be noticed. Both in the eyes of the readers, and the critics. (PS: We take credit for all Pug-POV romances on wattpad from here on ;))

How many of you have ever dropped a book midway? Yes. I know many must have done that. Now, when you write a book, you don't want the same thing to happen to you, right?

So here are some of the things that can make a reader drop your book:

- A vocabulary that requires the reader to buy a dictionary.

- A predictable plot.

- Excessive grammar errors.

- Stagnant chapters.

- Unrealistic dialogues.

So let us explain them to you:

1. A vocabulary that requires the reader to buy a dictionary : Readers usually drop a book when they get a vibe that the author wants to hold a funeral for the plot and bury it ceremonially under a pile of metaphors, similes, hyperboles, alliterations, and other forms of ornamental figures of speech. When I read such a sentence, this is my reaction-

"I decked my larynx and the trachea piped out syllables that couldn't form transverse waves because of the prolactin that seemed to shock my coronary artery." 

aka "I was so shocked, I couldn't form words."

I bet you would enjoy reading a book where there's 100 pages of such flashy language, wouldn't you?

 When you read such a book, you get a feeling that the author is constantly telling you," Did you see what I did there?" As if, the author expects us all to be FBI cryptologists and decode every sentence. Readers lose patience when they have to read loads of words which do not contribute to their understanding of the plot. It appears as if the author is writing for the sake of his own vanity and not for the readers.