Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Writing Your First Story

This is some advice that will only work for you during a very specific time in your writing career. That is, when you start writing for the first time. So you haven't written, and you want to write. How do you go about writing your first story? Here is another list of pieces of advice in order to get you on your way.

1) Start small.

For your first story, do not plan something large. You may be inclined to want to write an epic. Maybe you want to write a novel. Maybe you want to emulate your favorite author. Whatever your decision, my recommendation is that you set your goal to something small and manageable, and then do that.

How small is small? That depends on how old you are and how good of a writer you are. Personally, I'd say the smaller the better. If you write 1000 word chapters, how about a 10,000 word book? 10 chapters, 1000 words each. That is very obtainable. That's something you can tackle in a reasonable amount of time. Only can manage 500 word chapters? Plan a 5,000 word book. Yes, I know I'm sticking on the 10 chapters, but it doesn't have to be. You can write a 5 chapter (or 5 part) book just as easily as you can make it a 20 chapter 500 word book. How you cut it up or how you process it is entirely up to you.

The important thing is that it isn't something ridiculous. Keep it in reason. If you don't, you'll quickly lose confidence, inspiration, and motivation to complete. Don't obsess about making it as big or as grand as someone else's story. Just focus on it being a project you can complete.

If this is your "dream" story, the story you really want to write into a novel... use it. There is nothing that says you can't go back and turn your 10,000 word novelette into a real novel once you have it written. If anything, once you've got that rough draft out, you can use what you learned from it to write you larger, more complex story.

2) Don't be afraid to fix mistakes, but don't start over.

This is a tricky one. Some people get stuck in perpetual limbo, constantly tweaking and rewriting their story. Some people ought to spend a little time rewriting their story. That's the advantage of keeping your story short. If you only have a story with 10 some releases that you can finish in 3-6 months, just go ahead and finish the story. Don't worry about typo's and mistakes. Then, once the story is done, you can go back and tweak and fix and finish the story. Take the time to make a finished product, then put on the finishing touches.

Too many wattpaders obsess about covers, grammar advice, and the best name for a story that they haven't even written yet. If you're one chapter in, stop obsessing about it. Instead, finish it and then move on to your next chapter. This might not work if you writing a 200,000 word epic, but if you're writing 10,000 words, you can afford to just move forward and not obsess about what's happening now. Your story will be small enough and manageable enough that you can revisit, rewrite, and not lose years of your life every time you decide a large portion of your story needs rewriting.

3) Outline the story

This seems like a given to some authors, although it's something I don't always do myself. Some people just like to write, and they want to let the writing take them where they want to go. However, sometimes, where the writing takes you can lead you into traps where you depend on deus ex machina to get you out, or literary dead ends where you just can't think about how you can keep the story interesting.

In this case, you take your story and outline how you want it to go. You can go so far as to design each character. There are plenty of free novel writing software's that let you write character sheets, settings, and organized summaries. However, even just a rough outline of, in this chapter I want things to start this way and end this way, and the next chapter I want things to start this way and end this way.