Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Write WHATEVER you WANT

*Formerly "How do grammer wrok?". I didn't like that title so I decided to change it. 

Your story is what you want your story to be. I've made references to this fact a few times in this book, but I wanted to be clear on what this means. I'm hesitant to write this on the grounds that I don't want people to misunderstand what I'm saying. Read my chapter on 'What you can do and what you should do', before you get too excited by the words I'm leaving you in this chapter.

In school, writing seems like such a simple thing. There are specific and clear grammatical rules. A paragraph averages 4 sentences, a chapter averages 2500 words, ect... ect... This very book goes to great lengths to tell you these averages and these expectations so that you know what is expected of you as you write.

As you mature, you find out that a lot of these averages aren't definitive. Some of the greatest authors of all time routinely defy what is considered common sense. As a result, authors emulating those authors will go out and break the rules. Some rules they break are grammatical. Sometimes, they invent words that don't exist in our current dictionaries. Sometimes, they do something absolutely new, innovative, and refreshing.

So here's the horrible truth about writing. This is the thing your English teacher may never accept, but it is the truth never the less. You can write... whatever you want. There are no grammatical rules you can't break. There are no averages you have to stick to. There is nothing in writing holding you down from doing EXACTLY what you want to do. These things are arbitrary and made up, and it's only because of BIG ENGLISH that you've been oppressed all of these years. Sorry Grammar Nazis... you guys aren't doing anything but satisfying your own anal retentive nature.

What you create, no matter how much of a grammatical nightmare, is entirely up to you. That said, in the creation of literary work, there are exactly two restraints on your writing, and they fundamentally shape everything that we know about the English language. Every grammatical rule that exists is because of these two issues. English, as a language, exists because of these two restraints.

Those restraints are first, the capacity for you to easily communicate with other people. The second, is the mandates/expectations of your publisher.

The first thing is the only thing that matters here. You can publish just about anything on Wattpad. Okay, first off, even Wattpad has limitations. If you write just a string of intelligible characters, they might delete it. If you make overly racist/sexist/gruesome remarks, they may refuse to host it. However, in general, Wattpad lets you publish ANYTHING you want to publish.

Therefore, your ONLY limitation on Wattpad is your capacity to make your writing clear to the people reading your writing. All of these grammatical rules that we set up are only there to make it easier for people to read. If you don't follow the grammatical rules, or at the very least, use the grammatical rules in a way that people can follow, then no one will understand what you wrote.

This is how barely edited, barely readable stuff becomes popular on Wattpad. It doesn't need to be perfectly grammatically correct. All it needs to be is readable for the people who are the target audience. Don't get me wrong, most of the time, the target audience WANTS grammatically accurate writings. All of my chapters on pitfalls, exceptions, and grammar are there for your benefit. When presenting a work, making something grammatically correct and avoiding the annoying pitfalls does wonder towards making your story more accessible to your audience. However, you can make that story accessible to whatever audience you want.

A complex story with good sentence variety, no Buts or Ands to start a sentence, and well defined structure may be something I like, but a 13 year old girl might like reading a story that sounds like it was written by another 13 year old girl. Therefore, breaking down your grammar and writing a story in text speak might be the very thing your story needs to reach your text speak audience, no matter how much it annoys a more adult audience.