We Call This Writing

Why You Might Care About Anything I Have to Say

WHY YOU MIGHT CARE ABOUT ANYTHING I HAVE TO SAY

You have found your way to this book! Whether you read Natalie's Diary or searched for writing resources, welcome!

I'm from Canada and I've been writing since I was a little kid. I had a subscription to Writer's Digest by grade five, reading about how to query and that you should look into getting a literary agent before sending letters off directly to a publisher (because e-mail queries weren't standard at that point). Instead of going to school for that, I went to college for technical theatre and then for film. I worked predominantly in props in theatre and set decoration. My life is basically perpetually thinking about story and character and figuring out how to solve problems that come with characters played by actors touching tangible things that have to serve purposes while also being time-period appropriate, setting appropriate, and character appropriate.

There might be a small chance that you stumbled across this book by chance. In that case, let me explain a few things about me and what I've done on Wattpad so far. (I like to think that people are always a little interested in how people managed to get their reads, found their success, et cetera.)

At the beginning of March 2016, I started writing Natalie's Diary. A few things about Natalie's Diary: Originally, it was going to be called Emily's Diary, but I Googled that and discovered that it's already the name of a web comic strip type thing. Emily's Diary originally was the name of a fictional band I wrote about maaaaany moons ago. At some point, I thought hey, this sounds like a pretty wicked title for a horror book. I love horror stories. I will keep myself up all night reading stories from real people of real (or at least what they claim to be real) experiences, collected from Reddit and commenters on forums, et cetera. I wanted to write something that could recreate that edgy feeling you get after reading something a little creepy that makes you want to run to your bed as soon as you turn off the lights.

Originally, it sucked. I tried writing it for Nanowrimo one year and barely made it a couple chapters in. Jane was a boring protagonist, mostly because she didn't have a proper personality and mostly served as a simple vessel for the reader to experience the story. I put it aside for a long time.

In February 2016, I discovered Wattpad and decided I wanted to revisit this book idea. I re-evaluated my plot ideas, wrote an outline, and it worked out SO MUCH BETTER this time around.

Being new to Wattpad, I kind fumbled around for the first couple weeks. It took me a while to discover the (now non-existent) clubs, a lot of effort trying to search for bookclub books. I had a lot of free time in the beginning, so I joined like 5 book clubs, entered as many contests as I could before I ran out of story tags. I posted in as many 'rate your blurb', 'rate your last dialogue scene', 'rate your last paragraph' threads in the clubs (RIP) as I could after every new chapter was uploaded trying to get reads. And it was pretty half-decent in the beginning.

Then I got on the @mystery teen mystery reading list and BAM, all of a sudden, Natalie's Diary got into the top ten on the What's Hot list. It has since won me a 2016 Writer's Debut Watty Award and is a Featured book. 

There are a few factors that I believe made it work. For one, the mystery genre lends itself to the cliff-hanger-y chapter endings that urge readers on. My main character Jane is Fil-Am, and the second largest English reading demographic on Wattpad seems to be the Philippines, so I have that going for me. It's listed as mystery, but features teenage characters, so it appeals to the 13-18 demographic without having to compete with the thousands and thousands of teen fiction books to get onto the What's Hot list.

That's probably more than enough about me and Natalie's Diary in particularly. More about this book. I know there are a bazillion other books of writing advice. I've read them, too, and so many of them contain the same information about how to get popular on Wattpad and how to punctuate properly.

Since you and I have both read all that a million times over, I'd like to focus on all the stuff I've learned that struck me as oh, this is something I've never thought of before and other things outside of the usual box that've helped me.

If you have any questions that you'd like covered in coming chapters, maybe it's best to keep requests in the comments of this chapter. (Not that I won't try and answer them in other chapters, but it would be nice to keep things neat.)