Wattpad brings you a guest post from Niamh, author of Inamorata:
Nightingale is human - or would be, had it not been for the manner of her creation. Genetically engineered and grown to adulthood in a lab, she was created, not born. Why? For the sole purpose of the entertainment of rich men as one of the many Inamoratas in the bordello business . Beautiful, elegant, a superb dancer and an even better singer, she is the perfect lover for any man. Perfect, that is, except for her personality - the one thing you can’t engineer.
You Are What You Read…
When scratching my head and trying to come up with a blog post, I searched my memories for interesting conversations I’d had with fellow Wattpadders, trying to find something, anything, that would get some creative juices flowing. I was throwing stuff around the room, ready to freak out with frustration when I remembered something my good friend Kevin (username “Parogar”, the most illustrious author of Psych Investigation Episodes) had said to me.
He’d brought up the point that, no matter whether you’re a reader or a writer, it’s important to do a little bit of both.
People on Wattpad can usually be classified into one of two distinct but equally important species: readers and writers. Though there are some people who are truly both, usually, a person fits into one camp or the other.
Readers, for the most part, read Wattpad authors’ works, comment, fan, and only write a little bit. Writers, for the most part, focus on their own work, though they might have favourite stories they read and comment on. But switching between the two is crucial, especially for writers. After all, you are what you read.
What do I mean by that? Well, chances are, if you’re a writer, your writing style is a mishmash of your own creativity and the writing style of every author whose work you’ve ever read. It’s like anything you so much as skim goes into the melting pot of your brain and, eventually, when you go to write something down, what you end up putting on the paper will have been influenced by what you’ve seen. I’m not saying that writers copy their favourite authors (that’s utterly disastrous when it happens, and also really unfair to the original author), but good writing does have the tendency to rub off on impressionable writers. Therefore, a writer can draw on everything they’ve ever read in their writing, making it vital to actually read something other than their own work some of the time!
So it’s important to read, and it’s important to read good stuff, both from published authors and from Wattpad’s very own unpublished ones. If you’re a writer, sit down for a little while each day. Read something good, think about it, absorb the information, meditate, read it aloud in a warm bubble bath, do whatever it is you do when you read a good story. Pick works you like and authors you think are talented authors, because that’ll be the stuff that influences you when you sit down to write.
So read more, all you writers! You’ll be amazed to see what it does for the prose of your work, the flow, even the grammar!
And as for the readers out there (don’t think I’ve forgotten you) it’s important to write a little, too, if only to be able to understand the agony of writer’s block…
Check out the romantic sci-fi Inamorata on Wattpad!