Seven years of writing (and Wattpad)
Seven years ago today I decided to set up a Wattpad account. What started as a cautious experiment went on to change my life in ways I never could have imagined.
I just told my best friend that today is my seven-year Wattpad anniversary (Wattiversary?). Given that she’s the one who introduced me to the platform in the first place, it felt like something we needed to share. We both had a “holy shit, how has it been seven years already??” moment because 1) time is fake, I guess?? and 2) seven years on Wattpad means it’s been seven years since I decided to stop fantasizing about being an author and just do the damn thing.
To be honest, I had zero expectations when I started posting The Star and the Ocean on Wattpad. I hadn’t even heard for the platform before. All I knew was that I had a story that I was dying to get out — one I had been carrying around in my head for 20 years. My friend, who had just come clean about writing and self-publishing romance novels in secret (to great success, I might add), encouraged me to finally start writing it down. After all, we’d both been dreaming about writing books forever. I can still vividly remember us as teenagers driving around our small town at night, talking about the stories we couldn’t wait to tell.
Seven years ago, Wattpad was my answer to crippling self-doubt. I had no idea if there would be an audience for the book I was writing, nor did I know if I was good enough to pull it off. My friend recommended Wattpad as a safe place to test the waters and maybe get some feedback on the story as I shared it chapter by chapter.
To make a seven-year story short, this little Wattpad whim worked out better than I could have imagined. In 2017, The Star and the Ocean was one of 50 books to win a Watty Award — the platform’s annual writing competition that saw over 280,000 entries that year. The following year I was invited to speak on a panel at WattCon in New York City, where I got to meet and talk to some of my actual readers in real life. Over the course of writing the three original books in the Starborn Series (which also includes The Wind and the Horizon and The Fire and the Sky) I built a community of readers and made some of my closest friends, some of which have been with me since those very early days in 2016 (shoutout to my coven!).
Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that I owe it all to Wattpad — I owe it to my best friend bullying me into it (plus my willingness to try and fail and learn and grow) — but it’s still safe to say that my experience on the platform helped kick-start everything that came after. I started to take myself seriously as a writer. I went to writing events and networked like a proper professional. I won NaNoWriMo a couple times. I studied in The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser Univeristy. I wrote another novel, won RevPit with it and went on to sign with my amazing agent. The last seven years have been a whirlwind of words and stories, and it’s amazing to sit here today and look back on all I’ve accomplished.
Today, the original Starborn Series books have amassed over 1.1 million reads. Thanks to their success, I was invited to join the Wattpad Creators Program through which I’m actually being paid to write (Hooray!). I’m not saying every experience I’ve had on the platform has been good — there have been some significant low points too — but all told, it’s been a long and winding road that I’m glad I decided to follow.
If you have any questions about writing on Wattpad (or anything else for that matter), let me know in the comments!