Wattpad is a cultural artefact representing and changing current youth culture. This book is a self-reflexive attempt to unpack the social and cultural influence this artefact has on adolescents. In this study attempts will be made to describe some...
(This is a sample of an exercise that students could access on Wattpad and completed on their phones. It could be used in a senior English class to teach questioning technique or critical thinking skills)
Instructions for students: Watch the Youtube interview above and read the passage a few times. Devise 6 questions one from each category: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. Post your questions under comments below.
The passage: Chloe Gong-- A Kiwi Wattpadder
Chloe Gong is 21, she's from the North Shore, and she just wrote a US bestseller
Chloe Gong wrote "These Violent Delights" in her childhood home in Auckland in May 2018. As in: that month she started writing it, and also finished. She was 19. Seven months later she landed a "very nice deal" with Simon & Schuster – while she can't reveal the exact figure, not even to old friends like me, the two-book contract is worth somewhere between US$50,000 and $99,000.
The novel is a revamping of Romeo and Juliet, set in Shanghai. It was published on November 17, powered by Gong's Gen Z marketing nous and two major reviews. First came venerable literary magazine Kirkus Reviews: "A must-read with a conclusion that will leave readers craving more." (Gong also just made its best of 2020 issue). Next came Publishers Weekly, calling her retelling "incisive", her prose "arresting". "A lush, wholly original debut that will satiate Shakespeare aficionados and draw those seeking an engrossing, multifaceted historical fantasy," it said.
And then the New York Times released its bestseller charts for the week ending December 6. I met Chloe Gong in Year 11 at Rangitoto College. She was always reading a YA novel, and had bleached dip-dye hair which would shift between shades of pink and blue depending on the week. She was also a writer, so I had to be her friend. And for the next three years, she'd send me her Shakespeare notes when I ditched class to chase some infatuation. We vented about the lack of punctuation in Patrick Ness's "The Knife Of Never Letting Go", and ate lunch in A-block corridor while itching to get out of high school. On the last day of Year 13, one of our favourite English teachers, Mr Randal, asked us if we were going to keep writing.
Gong thanks him in her book "for being such an amazing English teacher and having so much passion for teaching Shakespeare. I completely owe my love of language to those class lessons in Year 12 and 13 analysing metaphor and symbolism and imagery, and I hope all your future students realise how lucky they are to have you as a teacher."
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Like most teenagers in the mid-2010s, Gong turned to the internet. Some of us made more of it than others. I ran an Arctic Monkeys fan Tumblr; Gong dropped full-length original novels on Wattpad. "I uploaded so much. But I was also removed from the general Wattpad community. In our era, it was mainly One Direction fanfiction. I did find my niche of these 200 – 500 people who read my weird paranormal series though."
She attributes her growth as a writer to Wattpad, and says it's given her a good start entering the publishing industry. "A lot of people have a hard time adjusting to random strangers commenting on their work. But I've had people sliding into my DMs giving unsolicited advice since I was 13 years old. You just have to ignore them."
At the same time: "You always remember your first hate comment. Or your first 300 word essay in your inbox on why your original characters are acting out of character."
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