The A Side ✔

10- Me and Wattpad

"Hey Scarlett, I saw your story You and Me and absolutely loved it!"

"I read your stories during a tornado and I was hooked!"

"You made me cry at 2:40 in the morning but you're so good at writing!"

Ever like the feeling when you wake up to switch your alarm off and check Wattpad for new messages first thing? Those quotes above are taken from real comments from readers of You and Me and as a writer, you know you are on the right track when people just stumble onto your writing and fall in love with it. The most notifications I ever had on a single day was 97, the majority being reading list adds for You and Me just after it got featured.

For a while, I wanted to build a fanbase. At fourteen, being severely bullied in school and having next to no friends, my world was tough. Making my notebooklover account (which sadly I hardly ever use anymore) changed not just my English but also my life in ways I could never have predicted. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was being myself. I hated hiding away under a different persona but on the Wattpad community, I wasn't afraid to be me. I did build up a fanbase with my Poetry but ultimately, it would be my stories that would bring the biggest impact.

Writing Fizzy Like Cola as a sulky single pringle was actually quite a lot of fun. Obviously as a newbie to longer stories, my writing style was rough but every writer has to start somewhere. The feedback I got during and after completion of the story was very mixed and I knew not everyone was going to like it. But it must have driven me to the point of writing inspiration because just four months later, I would write and complete my most successful story to date: You and Me.

I sort of have to credit my Gran for this. During a stay with her by the coast for a few days, I took my notebooks with me and just wrote. I also did a lot of reading too. Still writing Fizzy Like Cola at the time, nothing was going to stop me from drafting down some future ideas down in my story ideas notebook. One of them just after my dinner with my Gran just so happened to be You and Me.

I knew from the start that You and Me wouldn't be your typical story. As a young girl growing up, I was fascinated by letters and the Royal Mail so I took a fifteen year old girl called Sara coming out of a break-up with a guy called Mark who moves away to a different town. In those letters, in some ways, are like Sara's personal diary. She keeps her writing away from preying eyes. What I was more worried about was being single, never been kissed and all that, was I portraying a relationship correctly? But as the comments started to flow in, I guess making readers cry wasn't such a bad thing :P

Re-reading that statement, I sound rather mean ahahaha. But what I mean by that was if readers were reading You and Me and the main character Sara was making them cry, that meant they had been able to connect with Sara. I don't want to see readers starting to read a story and feel lost because the characters aren't that connectable.

It's done so well throughout its time on Wattpad. As I sit and type this, it's nearly at half a million reads which is staggering for me. No-one in my close friend and family circle could believe one simple story idea had turned into a reading frenzy. It was crazy.

I love that feeling walking through the streets of the city where I live and people walking by past you minding their own business but secretly in your mind, you're famous online. If you're famous on Wattpad, I dare you to go up to a stranger and say to them, "Hey! I'm famous, don't believe me? Just look on Wattpad!" XD

I started writing and given up many stories which is a shame but Anxiety for me personally does get in the way and often my prolonged writing absences on Wattpad are caused by my Anxiety flair-ups. It's nothing to do with people here on the website, it's my mind telling me all of my writing is rubbish. I've seen users on here saying if you want to be published, you must have a thick skin for rejections. If not, never try and get yourself published.

I have grown in some aspects regarding my writing confidence but that has been slow and often hard to deal with. I guess having a not so thick skin will be a longstanding part of me that won't change overnight.

After You and Me got featured and won competitions, I did feel pressure on me to write a much longer novel following all of the hottest trends or a Fanfiction but I just couldn't bring myself to do that because that wasn't me. It wasn't my persona, I had to try and start writing for myself.

Wattpad has given me the opportunity to do just that.