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What Should You Do With All Your Unfinished Projects?
An embarrassing novel I published as a teenager has taught me a lot about unfinished work
When I was fifteen, I started writing my own novel on the website, Wattpad. If you aren’t familiar with Wattpad (and I suggest you stay unfamiliar with it), it’s a site that allows anybody over the age of thirteen to publish their stories on the site for free and share them with other Wattpad users.
Wattpad isn’t a small production by any means — some of the most popular stories have millions of reads and go on to get published for real. One Wattpad author’s insanely popular Harry Styles fanfiction even landed its own movie deal and will hit theaters this year.
What stops most authors from considering Wattpad to be a serious publishing platform is its audience. Most of the stories are written by teenage girls who intend other teenage girls to read them. In a sea of lazily written fanfiction and high school fantasies, there aren’t a lot of stories that could make it to bookshelves. Browsing through Wattpad is like taking a stroll through the back of the 99-cent clearance section at the book store — only with a lot more grammar mistakes and typos.
Still, it’s one of the only places online that allows people — specifically teenage…
