An Adult Reader's View of Wattpad

An Adult Reader's View of Wattpad

I've read a number of really interesting items here on Wattpad with names like "No Nos for Writers" and "What I hate about Wattpad". These contain some very genuine and understandable concerns.

I’m a college professor in my 50s, and I’d like to put my two cents in. I recognize four sources of discontent: young writers, poor writing, using Wattpad as a social site, and categorization of stories.

Young writers

Quite a few people comment that it’s hard to find a ‘good read’ due to the prevalence of very young and inexperienced writers on this site. As a person who has loved to write since I was ten years old, I heartily applaud the young writers!

I saw a description one young writer had written about his piece. It said something like, “I am bored so I thought I’d write something here.” Well, of course, I know that I’m not going to be interested in reading his random thoughts, but – more power to him! How wonderful, to love writing as an activity! This is how the Bronte sisters began their writing careers: writing their imaginary play down as stories to amuse themselves and one another.

Hurrah for imagination! Hurrah for writing! But, a caveat…

Poor Writing

Where we have inexperienced writers and, let’s face it, sometimes self-indulgent writers, we will have poor writing. Bookstores and Amazon.com are full of poorly written books. Given the ease of posting a piece on Wattpad, naturally most of the material will not resemble Shakespeare or Joyce Carol Oates.

Yes, it would be nice if writers would use apostrophes correctly, proper punctuation and correct spelling. I find, in reading student papers, that only about 25% of them seem to understand contractions, plurals, and verb tenses. Unless it’s obvious that the writer is still in middle school or below (dead giveaway: “Megan is a 15 year old girl with two totally hot boys who want her.” – probably written by a girl age 12-14) perhaps we, the readers, should do the writer a favor and comment, kindly, that there is room for technical improvement.

As for plotting, pacing, and the finer points of good writing, I think we see some very good short pieces by less experienced writers. Book-length works really require good technique to maintain interest.

I don’t think we can legitimately complain about poor writing on Wattpad. It is disappointing to begin reading something and finding out after the first page that it isn’t written well. But face it: you can usually tell from the description, can’t you? If you read “She has the world at her feet, with doors starting to open for her. Then like a punch in the stomach a face appears in her world that drags her back” you probably know what you’re going to get. (Picture a face like a punch in the stomach!) And if you read “Annas mum and dad work all the time now they need to go away for a year and leave anna with the schools bad boy player Blake has been after her for 3 years so now is his chance” and you decide to read it anyway,you have no right to complain.

Use of Wattpad as a social medium

This is eventually going to become a major problem on Wattpad, I suspect. Just yesterday I saw a new ‘work’ posted by what sounded like a very young teenager. She had an interesting premise and I was curious about what she would do with it, though I could tell that it wasn’t going to be well-written. What I found when I started reading was about five simple declarative sentences summing up the main character (fifteen year old female, dead giveaway) followed by a paragraph begging people to comment on her story because it was the first thing she had written.

Some pieces seem to be written more for the message and comment exchange than for literary expression.

To be honest, if Wattpad had existed when I was a teenager, I would have done the same thing. Because the only person needier for attention than a writer is a teen. So – teen writers, imagine, right?

The problem is that the site becomes clogged with stuff that is written for a group of peers rather than for reading and critique.

Categories

For me, personally, this is the biggest problem with Wattpad. It’s frustrating to try to find something when you kind of-sort of have an idea what you want. You go to, for example, ‘Non-fiction’ and find a lovely story about a fifteen year old girl who has been selected as a mate by the alpha werewolf. You go to ‘Non-teen fiction’ and find 200 Harry Styles stories.  May I point out that many of my presumably well-educated college students refer to non-fiction works as 'novels'.  So there appears to be a lack of understanding about the categories.

Yes, Wattpad has a lovely and helpful category guide at www.wattpad.com/guidelines. You can also click on the dialog box above the 'category' box in the options section when posting a story. My experience with college freshmen is that the majority of them do not read written directions. Perhaps someone will post, or has already posted, a YouTube video explaining the categories.

I don’t think there’s a solution to this, based on the volume of posted stories and the fact that we self-select the category. I was curious about just how much is being posted on Wattpad every day. Last time I posted a story, I went to the category and sorted by ‘newness’. In just the minute it took me to do that, there were four newer stories. Six hours later, I gave up looking for my story on the list after the first 100. Obviously, the site can’t be curated. We, the readers, could give the writer a heads-up that they’re in the wrong category.

Implications

The major implication here is for adults who want to find a good read on Wattpad, and for adult writers who want our readers to find us.

Maybe there should be a category, “I’m old!”