Which version of Jennifer Egan’s “The Keep” do you like better - left or right?

Hi, my name is RaShelle Workman. I’m the author of the bestselling novel, EXILED, a young adult sci-fi romance.

It’s about an alien who’s exiled to Earth. The only way she’ll be allowed to go back to her planet? She has to help an arrogant boy find his soul mate. Piece of cake!

As an authority *snicker* on all things sci-fi, and romantical, I thought I’d list the top 5 places aliens visit when they come to our planet. That way, if you visit one of these places, and see someone who looks a little too beautiful or extra strange, you’ll know. They. Are. Aliens.

Counting down:

5) Roswell, New Mexico. The UFO Museum. They like to buy a couple of drinks at The Alien Caffeine Expresso Bar, and a t-shirt with a spaceship on it that says: LOOKING FOR ELVIS. Then they walk through the museum holding hands, gazing gleefully at the ridiculously cool stuff inside. 

4) Queensland, Australia. The Great Barrier Reef.You can see this awesomeness from space. They have to check it out up close. Swimming like the fish, and kissing the great white sharks they pass.  

3) Cairo, Egypt. Giza Pyramid and the Great Sphinx. Except they check out the inside, and play hide and seek until the wee hours of the morning. 

2) San Diego, California. ComicCon. Here, they purchase their own set of lightsabers (yep, that’s right., Star Wars is HUGE throughout the Universe). The dude alien goes up to Luke Skywalker lookalikes and says in a perfect Darth Vader impersonation, “Luke, I am your father!” while the girl snaps holographic pictures with the camera inside her eyes. 

And, 1) Rio de Janiero, Brazil. Carnival.Here, they invite a hundred of their closest friends, and PAR-TAYYYYY like the intergalactic rock stars they literally are! 

Now that you’ve checked out the 5 places aliens love to visit on Earth, be sure to read EXILED, published here on Wattpad. You can also read the first seven chapters of book 2, BEGUILED. For more information about me, you can visit my website, Facebook, and twitter. 

 BEGUILED goes on sale mid 2012, and ALIGNED: An Immortal Essence Short Story is available now in eBook, and paperback, on amazon. 

by Cristian Mihai

There are two types of people in the world: those who realize that this world is constantly reinventing itself and are usually capable of recognizing the new directions in which the world is headed, and those who can’t.

There’s this pathological fear that the world is more and more superficial; kids are dumb, the world is too fast and hungry and wants only to be fed information via an usb cable, people aren’t reading, paperbacks aren’t selling, bookstores are closing, and no one seems to read the newspapers anymore. And this is a global fear, it affects people on all continents, and yet…

The novel is not dead. Nor are short stories, or even plays. Why? Simply because there’s still a need, there’s still a demand. But the world is changing, I give you that. And the way people read has changed along the decades in such a subtle way that it requires a lot of attention to notice it. The way stories are told has changed as well; they are much more minimalistic, the style of most writers is terse, stripped naked of all embellishments.

But the novel is not dead, and it will never be. No matter what. And I strenuously believe it, simply because it’s one of our most fundamental of desires: to tell stories, to read them, to hear them, to share them. And there’s magic involved too. Imagine reading a book, imagine the solitude that the act requires, imagine the questions and the answers. And then there’s that certain empathy, the link that an author establishes with his reader. It’s a fascinating process, to be able to see into another person’s mind, to find another human being functioning in a different way than you are, to compare, to absorb ideals and beliefs in such an organic way. The best of books are not read like books. As cheesy as it sounds, they transfigure their medium, they become much more than just words.

Continue reading

Welcome to the Wattpad Workshop Series!

These are workshops for Wattpad writers who want to be inspired and challenged. You’ll come away with new ideas, new techniques and, most importantly, you’ll generate lots of new writing. The workshops run every Monday on the Wattpad Blog and all you have to do to join in is read the post and get writing – post your writing on the Weekly Workshop Series Discussion Thread!

• May 28th-June 25th - Ideas, Inspiration and Overcoming Writer’s Block
• July 2nd-July 30th - Character - The Pulsing Heart of a Good Story
• August 6th-Sept 3rd - Dialogue - Hear Those Voices On The Page
• Sept 10th-Oct 8th - Take It To A New Level - Fixes For Your Fiction
• Oct 15th-Nov 12th - Kickstart Your Writing - Trying New Things To Fuel Your Writing

The workshops are run by Alice Kuipers, bestselling author of Life on the Refrigerator Door, The Worst Thing She Ever Did and 40 Things I Want To Tell You. Visit her at www.alicekuipers.com:

Week 1

There are so many things to learn as a writer that it’s sometimes hard to know where to start, especially when that creative fire is burning inside and you just want to get words down.

The idea behind having this course came to me because I want to share some of the things I’ve learned as a writer (and, believe me, I’m still learning lots too) to make it easier for you to write all the stories, poems, and novels you can.

Every week, I’m going to post on some aspect of writing and finish up with a writing prompt. These first five posts will focus on where ideas come from, what to do when you’re stuck, and how to get inspired. So, let’s get started.

For these first five workshops, I’m using a book called IMAGINE by Jonah Lehrer to help me crystalize my ideas and bring what he says about the imagination and creativity specifically to the act of writing.

In IMAGINE, he refers to two scientists, Beeman and Kouinos. Apparently, they’ve discovered there’s a small part of the brain – called the Anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus – which goes crazy just before we have an insight. For years, I’ve been wondering as a writer where the imagination might be and what would happen if we damaged it. One of my early stories was all about someone who suffered brain damage to her imagination (she started seeing white rabbits at the station and thought she could fly). To be honest, knowing the name of this snippet of brain doesn’t help me feel like I’ve got any sense of what the imagination might be – it seems far huger than a tiny scrap of cerebral matter.

But as huge or tiny as it may be, what’s the best way to get this bit of your brain working? Well, it turns out, you just need to relax. The harder you try to force insights, the less likely you are to have them. (I love that the best way for me to work harder is for me to lie down on the couch!)

Our imaginations are set alight by these insights we have when we’re lying on the couch, having a warm shower, going for a walk, or staring out the window. You know the feeling, the burst in your mind when you have an insight, the explosion of excitement when your imagination catches fire. As a writer, you’re looking for that feeling to happen again and again as you work your way through a piece.

But these moments of insight only come when you fuel your mind with stories, art, newspaper articles, movies, pieces of conversation, relationships, experiences, research. Daily living and looking. 

Someone smarter than me said:

OBSERVATION + IMAGINATION = INSPIRATION

(and if you’ve ever been to a workshop I’ve run, you’ve probably heard me say this!)

I think this is a lovely, clear way to think about how to get inspired.

Observe the world (daily living and looking, and research). 

Let your mind wander. Imagine.

We’ll be looking at how to work on both aspects of inspiration in the coming weeks, but I’ll leave you now with the prompt for the week – we’re starting with a challenging prompt to really give you something to work with. If it seems too hard at first, let your mind wander and see if an idea pops into your head when you’re doing something else.

This week’s writing prompt:

Imagine that your character’s imagination is affected by something that’s happened to that itty-bitty bit of brain we’ve been talking about.

How does your character think now?

How is their imagination affected? How does it operate? What does it dream? What does it invent?

How did this happen to your character – was it an illness, an accident or a crime?

Write up to five hundred words from the point of view of your character. (Use the ‘I’ voice. This will be a hindered narrator, for those of you who like the technical term).

If you like, share your work in the Improve Your Writing Club, on the Wattpad Workshop Series discussion thread. I’ll check in and read some of the responses, giving feedback if I have any, and answering some questions.

To celebrate the June 12th release day of THE SURVIVORS: POINT OF ORIGIN, Amanda Havard and Wattpad have teamed up to give away a relic of the troubled protagonist, Sadie Matthau! As you know, Sadie is true lover of style and fashion…

Find out more!

Thank you! We’re glad you like it.

Want to help fulfil the dreams of an aspiring novelist?

Check out Wattpad writer Jake Vander Ark’s Kickstarter project!

You can start reading some of Jake’s stories on Wattpad!

Which version of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” do you like better - 1, 2, or 3?

What sort of woman would give up her own child in the struggle to be famous?

What would you be willing to sacrifice for the ultimate prize?  Your friends? Your family? Your health? Your relationships?

The media tells us that if you want to succeed, want to excel, want to attain your dreams, you have to be entirely ruthless and single minded. The message is constantly being banged home in singing, dancing and other talent competitions. Chefs, business apprentices – they all have to give “110 per cent” of themselves to the job. So you are doubtless going to have to make some sacrifices in other areas. You can’t give everything to your career if you have a child to care for and love.

The hard working parent who later laments the time they didn’t spend “watching their children’s school plays” is a cliché, as is the child who grows up to resent his or her parents’ absence from their early years. Some people forgo relationships or let marriages and friendships slip in the rush to be “successful” or “rich” or “famous”. But what about someone who goes all the way in choosing their career over their child? Someone who knows that if they make the decision to bring their child up they will never achieve their dreams?

Mommie Dearest [Photo source]

There have been examples both in fact and fiction of successful and famous women who have neglected – or even abused - their children for their careers. Sometimes the children have hit back later, like Christina Crawford, daughter of the great Hollywood star, Joan, in her memoir, “Mommie Dearest”.

To be a bad mother is one of the great taboos of our age. In the days when the middle and upper classes had servants it was perfectly normal for children to look upon their housekeepers and nannies as surrogate mothers, (think of Scarlett O’Hara’s “Mammy” in “Gone with the Wind”, not to mention “Mary Poppins”). But to the modern sensibility the idea of a mother who neglects or is indifferent to her children is unthinkable. Such relationships have spawned any number of “misery memoirs” like Dave Pelzer’s “A Child Called It”, written by people unable to forgive what was done to them by their mothers. Readers will nearly always be led to despise these women as much as the authors do.

We Need To Talk About Kevin [Photo via The Guardian]

In “We Need to Talk About Kevin” Lionel Shriver showed the consequences of a mother trying to do her duty, while feeling no maternal love for her child. So, what if a woman knows from the moment she conceives that she will be a bad mother, and instead of soldiering on like Kevin’s mother, she makes a conscious choice to give the child to someone who she knows will make a better job of it? If the readers understand her motivation will they be willing to stay on her side? That was the question that haunted me while I was writing “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”. Then I asked myself how that child would react when reunited with the mother she didn’t even know she had.

Maggie de Beer chose the dream she wanted to follow on the day she ran away from home at 15, but the child she abandoned eventually becomes the key to her achieving the fame that she had worked so hard and fruitlessly for, sacrificed so much for. Would that mean that it was a sacrifice worth making? Even if Maggie believes so, would the child feel the same way?

So, how many of us would you be able to go that extra mile, making the ultimate sacrifice to win their moment in the celebrity spotlight, the stardom of their dreams?

To be separated from your child at birth and unable to watch them growing and thriving must be one of the most painful experiences any mother can endure. Worse of course to have them die before you, but there must be a very special agony in knowing that they are alive, growing up somewhere else, in someone else’s care, loving someone else, and that you have no part in their lives.

The reunion of such mothers with their lost children is bound to be fraught with dangers. What if they hate you? Blame you? Want nothing to do with you? What if they have been told nothing of your existence and would prefer not to be disillusioned about those they believe to be their true parents? What if it looks like you are back only to cash in on their good fortune? What if you come to regret your decision? Maggie has to face all these questions and many more and the difficulty as a writer was to lead the readers to understand why she did it, and to forgive her.

Check out the new design for Wattpad’s home page at www.wattpad.com!

We’re incredibly proud of our HQ team who worked really, really hard this past month to get our rebranded page off the ground! 

What do you think of our new look? We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Welcome to the Wattpad Workshop Series!

These are workshops for Wattpad writers who want to be inspired and challenged. You’ll come away with new ideas, new techniques and, most importantly, you’ll generate lots of new writing. The workshops run every Monday on the Wattpad Blog and all you have to do to join in is read the post and get writing – post your writing on the Weekly Workshop Series Discussion Thread!

• May 28th-June 25th - Ideas, Inspiration and Overcoming Writer’s Block
• July 2nd-July 30th - Character - The Pulsing Heart of a Good Story
• August 6th-Sept 3rd - Dialogue - Hear Those Voices On The Page
• Sept 10th-Oct 8th - Take It To A New Level - Fixes For Your Fiction
• Oct 15th-Nov 12th - Kickstart Your Writing - Trying New Things To Fuel Your Writing

The workshops are run by Alice Kuipers, bestselling author of Life on the Refrigerator Door, The Worst Thing She Ever Did and 40 Things I Want To Tell You. Visit her at www.alicekuipers.com:

Week 2

Last week we looked at where inspiration comes from. I suggested that:

OBSERVATION + IMAGINATION = INSPIRATION

Which is something someone told me many years ago.  This week, we’re going to think about OBSERVATION and ways to use our powers of observation to improve our writing. 

Some writers carry a pen and notepad with them at all times, others scribble notes in their minds and jot them down fully later. Smartphones and iPads have note-taking apps that can email a note directly to your inbox.  All of this to say that one of the best things I think you can do for your writing, especially when it comes to generating new ideas, is to make note of everything that interests you. 

One of my favourite note-taking exercises is to go and listen to someone’s conversation and write it down. The other day, I heard someone say, “She didn’t know what was wrong until she licked him.”  I wanted to hear more but the two women having the conversation drifted out of earshot and I was left with my imagination stirred and the inspiration for several stories sparking in my brain.  Now, I know it can feel a little awkward or even creepy to eavesdrop, so I try not to be obvious about it. One of the things about being a writer is that it is your job to notice the world around you and to draw from that experience.  I try and tell myself that someone would be flattered if they knew I was inspired by a snatch of their conversation and then I get on with writing things down.

Another way to observe the world is to step outside and make notes about the weather. You might think that a sunny day is really easy to describe, but if you actually go outside and write the words to capture that sunny day on the page you’ll find you steer away from cliché and start truly describing how the sun feels on your skin, how the air tastes, and so on.

Sitting in a café and people-watching is a fine way to spend time as a writer. Someone will catch your imagination, and then the art is to truly describe what they look like, how they hold themselves, what they are wearing or carrying.  These sorts of notes will come in helpful when you least expect it.

So, one way to observe is to look out at the world around you. Another way is to read – read novels, poems, stories, other work by Wattpad writers, plays, non-fiction, blogs. If you want to travel to the other side of the world but you can’t afford the plane ticket, find a book that takes you there. There is no reason for you to feel inhibited writing about anything – if you don’t know something, teach yourself so you can tell the stories you want to tell.  I don’t believe that writers should only ‘write what they know’.  My belief is that the imagination is a powerful tool and with it, we can take ourselves as writers anywhere. One of my main rules for my daily writing life is to read 50 pages a day. Not write a certain number of pages a day because I know that will follow from enriching my imagination with reading.

Observe by going to art galleries and letting the paintings there inspire you.

Observe by watching movies and letting the narrative within take your ideas to a new level.

Observe by travelling – if you can’t leave your home-town, go to a new café or walk a different way to school, there are many ways to give yourself a new perspective on your environment.

Observe by interviewing someone and discovering their story.

Observe by finding out something you never knew before online.

This week’s writing prompt:

Observe your neighborhood. Make notes from your front doorstep for at least five minutes.

Either – write up to 300 words of the opening of a story set outside your front door (use your observations!)

Or – write a poem made up of words that you’ve written in your doorstep notes. 

Post your writing on the Weekly Workshop Series Discussion Thread. I’m away in Cuba this week, but I’ll check in and give feedback as much as I am able considering I won’t have good internet access.  When I get back, I’ll make sure I catch up on any stories I miss.

Wattpad brings you a guest post from Jake Vander Ark, author of The Accidental Siren and Lighthouse Nights:

I’ve been a film-geek since the day I was born. I watch movies, I read about movies, I revel in movie trivia and pride myself on my ability to deconstruct every aspect of a film. I liked movies so much that I even moved to Los Angeles to become a director. 

I arrived in LA with the assumption that every working filmmaker shared my love, respect, and passion for cinema. Every famous producer goes to the cineplex to devour as many movies as possible, right? Every famous director spent his childhood learning his craft through endless Star Wars marathons, right?

The truth is, the majority of successful directors come from other fields without a previous obsession with film. This is upsetting to young cinephiles like myself who consider themselves connoisseurs of the art form. I didn’t think it should be possible for a filmmaker to make movies without watching every film ever made!

I’m going to use that anecdote to justify an embarrassing truth about myself; a truth that many Wattpadders might find deplorable: I rarely read books.

I can count on one hand the amount of fiction books I’ve read in the last three years. I have never read Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or the classics like “The Great Gatsby,” “Pride and Prejudice,” or “In Cold Blood.” When I tell somebody I’m a writer, their first question is always, “What books do you like?” I usually just stare at them, mutter something about Stephen King, and change the subject.

The fact is, we all come at writing in our own way. I used my rich background in film to teach myself structure, dialogue, and other essential storytelling techniques that translate to writing novels.

Whether you’re a film buff or a casual movie-goer (or even if you hate films altogether), everyone can gain writing insight from the cinema, do I decided to make a short list of movies and TV shows that influenced the way I write. Chances are, the following list will contain films you’ve seen, and films you’ve never heard before. I encourage you to search them out and watch them in new light!

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Doubt, and Glengarry Glen Ross

Want to spice up your dialogue? These three movies will give you a crash course in writing amazing banter for your books. I’ve seen these movies ten times each. I fall asleep with them on the TV and let the dialogue infiltrate my subconscious. I memorize large portions of the dialogue and then try to figure out what makes it work. As you watch these movies, try to figure out who holds the power in each scene. Who is strong? Who is weak? What do characters want? What do they say to get it? How does the screenwriter use dialogue to show us who they are, where they’re from, and what they want?

The Wire (TV)

Everything I know about structure, I learned from The Wire. Every season of this show is the TV equivalent of a novel with rich characters and brilliant story arcs. Watch how the writers plant seeds in the first season that blossom in the fifth. Watch how they lay a foundation of realism, so when the crazy stuff happens, we believe it. Watch how the order of scenes is used to enhance the drama. And then watch it again.

Breaking Bad (TV)

Native Americans were known to use every piece of the buffalo they killed. Nothing went to waste. They ate the meat, carved knives from the bones, and made blankets from the fur. Likewise, the writers of Breaking Bad know how to suck the drama out of every element of this simple show. They don’t waste a single character, location, or concept. Every facet of every problem is explored and exploited for dramatic effect. Do your characters have through-lines? Have you introduced an amazing location that you can bring back to your story? If you have an exciting concept, have you explored every detail, implication, and ramification?

Rosemary’s Baby

This horror classic taught me how to build and sustain tension, how to raise the stakes, and how to devise the worst possible scenario. When you watch Rosemary’s Baby, watch how the director uses horror conventions to terrify the audience. Since nothing scary really happens, why do we find ourselves screaming at the screen? Is there a way to implement these devices into your own writing?

The Incredibles, Wall-E, and Up

Watch Pixar movies to learn how to simplify your stories. Like Breaking Bad, nothing is introduced unless it will have a profound effect on the central problem. How does Up make us cry in the first ten minutes of the movie? How does Wall-E move us without any dialogue? Watch the action in The Incredibles. The epic super-hero scenes are meticulously planned out, yet they feel spontaneous! Is there something you can learn from these scenes to apply to your action stories?

Here are a few more quick lessons I learned from film and TV:

Inception

Exposition can be invisible, even in science fiction.

Jurassic Park

Use “dread” to keep your reader turning the pages.

Sunshine

Every single scene should raise the stakes of the story.

Six Feet Under (TV)

Harness sentiment and use it sparingly.

Game of Thrones

Make readers identify with the plight of your characters as quickly as possible.

The Dark Knight

Even superhero stories can have a believable plot and realistic characters.

There are also some examples of what not to do:

The Royal Tennenbaums

Quirks alone do NOT make characters interesting.

Pirates of the Caribbean 3

Lack of story structure and ambiguous mythological rules makes a story impossible to follow.

Lost (TV, season 7) and Lady in the Water

Be careful when you bring a character back from the dead, it can ruin your stakes!

Before I end this, I need to make it clear that I do read! I read at least one piece of fiction every year, and I absorb a vast amount of information from that single experience. I have read at least five books on fiction writing, and five more on screenwriting. I also have a firm understanding of grammar and sentence structure; if you find that you need help in these areas, movies will not help you!

So remember, a good reader does not necessarily make a good writer, and a good writer does not necessarily read a lot of books! Find your own path into writing fiction. Draw from your own experiences to make your writing unique, and pinpoint your own special talent to help improve your work!

Check out Jake Vander Ark’s Kickstarter Project:

Immortality, Miracles, and The Prettiest Girl in the World. 4 Novels in 4 Months!

A true transmedia experience. Check out Collider World:

Mysteriously transported to a post-apocalyptic future, six people need to find a way to get back to the present and save mankind - and their own lives.

My name is Peter Ansay and this is my story and the story of the events that lead to the jump into the future.

Read my book to learn more.

Watch the Series. Read the Comics. Play the Game.

Last Saturday, June 2nd, we hosted our second Wattpad meetup in New York City. We had a ton of fun meeting Wattpad readers and writers, especially Brittany Geragotelis and Caitlyn Duffy! 

Check out some of our photos below, and Caitlyn Duffy’s blog for a recap of our Wattpad party!

FROM FEATURE PHONES TO 5 MILLION STORIES

With the announcement of Wattpad’s $17.3M new funding from Khosla Ventures today, CEO and Co-founder Allen Lau shares the past, present, and future of Wattpad:

It seems funny now, but I first started prototyping an early version of Wattpad in 2002 on an old Nokia Java phone. I wanted to be able to read while I was on the go, but back then only five lines of text could be displayed on the small grainy screen. 

Fast forward to 2006, when cell phones were becoming more sophisticated and really starting to spread, it turned out my friend Ivan also happened to be working on enhancing the mobile reading experience. So, we decided to join up and explore our hunch that connecting readers and writers through a mobile, social community would lead to some very interesting results.

Since then over 5 million stories in 25 languages have been uploaded to Wattpad! Not many people know that we’re seeing engagement numbers which rival Pinterest, as we give users a new way to create and be entertained. In May, people spent over 1.7 billion minutes on Wattpad; crafting and sharing original new fiction spanning romance, mystery, sci fi, thriller, poetry and even fanfiction remixes and mashups that have interesting implications for brands and celebrities like One Direction.

But Wattpad isn’t just about the big growth numbers. We’ve created a positive, emotional product that fosters creativity and self-expression. We’re democratizing the written word and seeing incredible new types of collaboration come to life. On Wattpad we have friendly editors working to help others develop their writing, and groups of designers collaborating to supply the cover art for stories simply because they love designing.

Give people the tools, and the participation is incredible! 

Just search for “Wattpad story trailers” on YouTube to see what I mean about creativity. People are more than consumers, they are inherently producers.

Today we’re excited to announce our new round of funding led by Khosla Ventures and to take this opportunity to share more news on what’s been happening with our community along with some thoughts on the future.

A NEW FORM OF ENTERTAINMENT

We have users writing interactive stories, building audiences of tens of thousands of fans, and seeing tens of millions of reads of their stories. Some have signed big book deals, or optioned their work for TV.

We don’t determine who or what gets published - again, it’s about the network instead of the traditional hierarchy. So, while Wattpad sometimes gets pegged as operating within the traditional publishing industry we are not a publisher. We don’t see ourselves playing in this space at all. Wattpad is actually creating a completely new digital entertainment category, one that hasn’t existed before.

Here’s my favourite example: a traditional publishing house like Penguin published 5000 books in the last 12 months, while Wattpad users uploaded 10,000 stories in just the last 12 hours! We have something for everyone - every sub-genre and every specialized interest. The diversity of human creativity is what makes Wattpad so great.

We also believe that writers want to be read by people from around the global. DRM, territorial rights and proprietary eReading experiences run counter to people’s offline behaviours in sharing books. We take the best characteristics of how people interact through storytelling and make this work on the web and across all mobile devices without any legacy issues. Wattpad is ubiquitous and platform agnostic and all about convenience and access.

READ ANYWHERE. ANYTIME.

Even though we’re in the “digital age”, people still love to read great stories for entertainment and pleasure, and Wattpad is adding a unique mobile social element to the game at a price that can’t be beat: Free! It’s a fun new approach to one of the oldest forms of entertainment–storytelling. 

We’re excited about finding new ways to make long-form written content bite-sized and digestible for the mobile world, encouraging things like chapter-by-chapter uploads as well as collaborative and interactive fiction. 

WATTPADDERS <3 READING & WRITING

We work really, really hard to foster a positive community; a place where people can feel safe and comfortable sharing their work knowing it will reach an appreciative audience and receive constructive feedback. That is something I am extremely proud of. It’s something that sets us apart. Wattpad is a place where artistic expression and creativity can flourish. 

Writers who have faced rejection from traditional publishers email us everyday to tell us how their work has finally found an audience. People love to write, not necessarily for money; and often, hearing directly from 100 people who love your story is in some way just as powerful as selling millions of copies.

THE NEXT 400 YEARS

Storytelling is entertainment that’s fundamental to human nature; it has been ever since the days when cavemen scrawled drawings and painted symbols to tell stories on cave walls. Gutenberg invented the printing press over 400 years ago, and I believe we are creating a product and a community that will come to define how people share and connect over stories for the digital age.

Ivan and I are very excited about building our company in Canada. Not since the very early days of Flickr has a consumer-facing internet business achieved such global scale here. We’re happy that Khosla Ventures and Union Square Ventures have looked North and believe that we’re creating something very special right here in Toronto. We look forward to expanding our team (want to join us?) and enhancing our focus on collaborative and interactive storytelling to support our amazing community.

- Allen

Which version of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky do you like better - 1, 2, or 3?

Check out the new trailer for the movie adaptation starring Logan Lerman and Emma Watson:

by Cristian Mihai

Agatha Christie got 500 rejections, and then went on to sell more books than anyone else on the planet, with the exception of Shakespeare.

J.K. Rowling got 12 rejections, before making a billion dollars out of Harry Potter, and breaking all sorts of ridiculous records in terms of books sales.

Dr. Seuss got a rejection letter than went like this, “Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.” Of course, he didn’t give up.

“I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” — this is how the youngest writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was rejected.

“We feel that we don’t know the central character well enough.”- this is what Sallinger got for The Catcher in the Rye, which is probably famous just because the narrator has such a clear and interesting voice.

For any aspiring writer, a rejection letter, regardless of the provenience of said letter, is one of the most dreaded of objects. In this line of work, getting rejected is considered a sort of literary murder — people are knowingly destroying something you’ve spent time on, and a lot of it. But the thing is everyone got rejected, more or less. I can think of very few instances when writers found publishers/agents from the first try. Or the second, or the tenth.

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Wattpad brings you a guest post from T.J. McGuinn, author of The Waking Moon, our newest featured story:

When I was little, I was a daddy’s girl. I loved doing errand runs with my dad, even when he went to boring places like the hardware store. Even though I wasn’t into sports, I’d wear a Raiders jersey and watch football games with him, dancing around and high-fiving whenever our team got a touchdown. And even though I hated to ride roller coasters, I would always suck it up and go with my dad, so that he wouldn’t have to ride them alone. But more than anything else, I’d go with him to see action movies—loud, explosion-filled stories that I never would’ve watched on my own.

For me they were “guy movies.” The heroes were strong. They never showed fear. They always kept their cool. And there wasn’t a bind too tight for them to escape. And these heroes were always men. 

The women in the films were always beautiful. But that was it. Beyond the perfect curves and gorgeous hair, they didn’t have much going for them. They couldn’t find their own way out of a shoebox. They ran away from bad guys in impractical footwear. They wore very little and screamed very loud. And I hated that I was supposed to identify with them.

Then Terminator II came along. According to its backstory, the Linda Hamilton character, who’d spent the first Terminator movie running around in a pink waitress dress, had spent several years in a mental institution getting really buff and really tough. Now she was strong. She never showed fear. She always kept her cool. And there wasn’t a bind too tight for her to escape. Throughout the movie, I put myself in her place. I imagined I could be that strong, that cool, that tough. It was then that I understood why guys like those movies so much. And why I never did.

Everyday life is difficult. It is rife with moments that make us feel stupid or ugly or alone or misunderstood. We’re at the mercy of the world and all its cruel whims. We feel helpless. That’s why we’re drawn to books and movies. They allow us to escape the limitations of our lives (and ourselves) and experience the extraordinary. And there’s nothing extraordinary about a hand-wringing damsel in distress. It’s just an exaggeration of how we secretly feel every day.

Just like boys, (who, I’m sure, also spend their waking hours feeling inadequate and insecure) we’d like to get lost inside some fantasy realm where girls have more to offer than bulging sweaters. We’d like to know that there’s power in us. That we can save ourselves, and others, too. That we aren’t just breasts, butt, and legs, but brain, muscle, sinew, knuckle, and a thunderous beating heart.

The main character in my novel The Waking Moon is a regular 16-year-old girl facing bizarre and horrifying circumstances on her own. But she doesn’t sit around waiting to be saved. She takes control. It’s what we all want to do.

If you ask me, we’ve spent enough time longing to be ravished by a gorgeous vampire. It’s time for girls to grab bows and arrows and get in the game. We have a revolution to lead. 

Check out The Waking Moon on Wattpad:

Paulette’s life is in shambles. Her sister is dead, her mother is a drunk, and she’s been forced to transfer into a chaotic public school full of bullies. Things go from bad to worse when, one night while driving them home from dinner, her intoxicated mother hits and kills a teenage boy and is sent to jail. Now Paulette is truly alone. But when the teenage boy mysteriously comes back from the dead looking for Paulette, she finds herself face to face with the purest love on earth.

Wattpad Podcast with Tanya Evans, author of Going Through the Motions, Quick Silver, Under My Skin, and more:

Listen to our podcast interview with Tanya Evans, a fellow Canadian and prolific writer of romance, speculative fiction, mystery, and fantasy. We explore the writing themes of “going against the grain,” girl x girl love stories, dealing with writer’s block, and more.