My Experience Writing Fiction on Wattpad

Since this is my first ever block party entry, I thought I'd start this off by introducing myself and giving my followers (new and old) a small scope into my life as a writer and how I've grown from being the young, naive and inexperienced teenager I once was to the much older (still pretty naive) 21 year old I've become.

I was first introduced to this site when I was 14 years old. Back in 2011, and let me tell you, this site was a very different place. There were less people, less writers and a lot more readers. I was mainly a reader, scanning the what's hot list for something new to devour every other week. I read mostly predominantly white teen-fiction romance with fluffy happy-ever-afters and problematic lead characters. But I was only 14 and deep, challenging thinking wasn't really something I was accustomed to yet. I never once read any books with POC (people of colour) as the main lead or LGBTQ characters. It wasn't even something I really thought about, I just read what was available to me.

I started really writing and sharing my work on wattpad when I was 16. My first book, some of you might remember, was Cookies & Cream and like expected was a predominately white casted book with problematic, 1st dimensional characters. It was predictable as hell and honestly, just thinking about it now makes my toes curl. I'm cringing so hard.

I didn't have much of a reader base, but I was happy. I had this one reader who constantly voted and commented and over the course of the book we'd become really good friends. She, like myself, was a WOC (women of colour) and asked me constantly why I'd never written about anyone that looked like me. My answer was always 'it's just so much easier not to,' without really realising how pathetic of an answer that was, was I insinuating people who looked like me required a certain level of effort to write? And was I further insinuating that people who looked like me didn't deserve said effort?

Again, it wasn't really something I thought about. I never considered my writing or my works problematic (there was a lot of slut shaming, homophobia and micro aggressions I'd slipped in without even noticing). So I write on for another year but life at home started getting really hectic.

I started university when I was 18 (so about 4 years after opening my wattpad account), I'd gone through a really tough breakup and my self-confidence and self- image hit rock bottom, I also stopped writing to try and concentrate on uni which, at the time, was sucking the life out of me. And for almost a year, I didn't log into wattpad once. I'd joined a few activist groups on campus, I learnt a lot more about my history and heritage, I meet some amazing people, I became best friends with a gay guy who taught me so so much about himself and, in the process, about me too.

I learnt about the importance of positive representation of minorities in all forms of media. In films, magazines, articles and books. I worked on a piece for my monthly uni issue (kind of like a paper...but not?) and wrote about myself and my struggles as a WOC while growing up and the amount of people who told me they felt the same, the amount of people who told me they appreciated me coming out or that my piece resonated with them in some way really spoke to me. Things like this, writing about me, was so important.

Fast forward to my 19th birthday a few months later, when I finally returned to wattpad. It was strange at first, my books were still being read and much to my surprise I had a bit of a fanbase (around 4k at the time). But in all honesty, I lost interest in writing, my books reflected nothing about me as a person. I was initially going to leave the site, I was ready to say goodbye. But I stumbled upon a book a few days later, it was a mainly POC casted book and seeing that...it made me hopeful. It made me want to stay and explore more books like that one.

Shortly after that I discovered, WeNeedDiverseBooks, which honestly was a godsend because it told me two things: being a POC was a beautiful thing and that people wanted to see more POC in literature and me, a writer of colour, couldn't just leave without giving back at least once. So I wrote my first ever black main character, Flo, from my book In Between. She wasn't perfect, and honestly, for a while I wasn't a big fan but....so many people were.

I got so many comments from people telling me how much they loved and appreciated her, how they were so happy there was finally someone who looked like them in a main role. It made me so happy, really really happy in fact. So I kept writing, and to this day I make sure that all of my works have either an LGBT character (Murphy from Murphy's law) or a WOC as the lead (almost everything on my profile).

So I guess what this site has taught me is that writing isn't just writing, it's so much more than words on a page, and that we all have a duty and responsibility to make sure we represent ourselves and others to the best of our abilities. So I challenge you all to go out of your comfort zones and explore different genres and pieces, you'll be amazed at what you discover.

Lots of love

Anne x