![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There are three tiers of Wattpad stories:
On the site itself:
On said romance stories:
~~~
I restarted the book again; it was going in a direction I didn't like. The 10,000 words weren't totally wasted, but I don't know how many of them are salvageable.
It's a good thing I'm writing this book for myself and not for Wattpad, though it may very well end up there one day. There's no romance in it.
- Terrible.
- Enjoyable, so long as you don't think about them too much (or at all).
- Genuinely good.
On the site itself:
- The search function is abysmal.
- Heaven help you if you want to read anything on Wattpad other than romance stories.
On said romance stories:
- You cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a billionaire or crime boss of some variety, and I'm willing to bet that the only difference between the two is that one's made his fortune through illegal means.
- Kidnapping is apparently a great way to start a romantic relationship.
~~~
I restarted the book again; it was going in a direction I didn't like. The 10,000 words weren't totally wasted, but I don't know how many of them are salvageable.
It's a good thing I'm writing this book for myself and not for Wattpad, though it may very well end up there one day. There's no romance in it.
Tags:
From:
no subject
Although, interestingly, serial killer/gruesome torture fiction is very popular with women, but I don't get the impression that there is a big amateur market for it -- at least where fanfiction.net was concerned, even for shows where the original series revolved around forensics or tracking down criminals the majority of fanfics always seemed to involve writing slash and/or hurt-comfort relationships between male protagonists, rather than detailed scenes of OC villains persecuting young women, which is what the commercial market seems to get off on. I suspect there may be a perceived 'letting down the feminist side' element going on, in that people don't want to admit to/appear to advocate the enjoyment of such material. Or possibly it's simply more *difficult* (and further outside the writers' own experience, as opposed to writing adult men behaving like teenage girls) to produce...
(But maybe I'm talking rubbish, because I think there has always been quite a lot of 'Phantom' fiction featuring Erik kidnapping, recapturing, brainwashing and generally tormenting Christine... which is fine, because he really loves her so can be excused anything :-p)
On Wattpad being dominated by romance, I imagine there's also an issue with people not wanting to post anything else because the site is seen as being a place to come for romance -- if you wanted to write a story about two gangsters in an uneasy alliance just waiting for the inevitable misunderstanding and tragic ending, you probably wouldn't expect a readership to be looking for it in the middle of a whole load of books about "The Sheik's Secret Son" and "Romancing the Billionaire". There's not much incentive to upload something you know the available audience doesn't have any interest in, after all.
Billionaires and crime bosses are the staples of commercial soft-porn romance, which I assume is what most of it is being based upon. I mean, I base my stories heavily on the sort of stuff I was reading when I was a teenager -- it just happens that it was a diet of early 20th century adventure fiction, coupled with high fantasy and angsty historical novels...
That's very probably not a coincidence!
Is it not possible to identify the point/juncture at which the wrong turn took place? There can be a considerable cathartic relief in locating the place where the problem originated and stripping everything back to there (and possibly hurling the crumpled pages into the wastepaper basket).
From:
no subject
I can understand, on some level, the appeal of a man who's in control of himself and his life. I can't find anything sexy about a man physically and psychologically harming a woman until she breaks down and decides that she loves him. Not every Wattpad romance plays out like this, but a lot of them do.
On Wattpad being dominated by romance, I imagine there's also an issue with people not wanting to post anything else because the site is seen as being a place to come for romance -- if you wanted to write a story about two gangsters in an uneasy alliance just waiting for the inevitable misunderstanding and tragic ending, you probably wouldn't expect a readership to be looking for it in the middle of a whole load of books about "The Sheik's Secret Son" and "Romancing the Billionaire". There's not much incentive to upload something you know the available audience doesn't have any interest in, after all.
You really do know me, don't you? :P
I actually had no idea, because Wattpad doesn't advertise itself as being romance-centric, but I guess it is. I wish there were a site specifically for stories that don't have romance as the main focus.
I mean, I base my stories heavily on the sort of stuff I was reading when I was a teenager -- it just happens that it was a diet of early 20th century adventure fiction, coupled with high fantasy and angsty historical novels...
Same here, except I was reading angsty coming-of-age YA novels.
In regards to my own book, it's just a matter of moving some scenes around and rewriting one or two. It's back on track for the time being.
(This is the fifth time I've tried to write the opening of this book. I hope it works this time.)
From:
no subject
Well, I used to crawl round at the bottom of my bed beneath tightly tucked-in blankets as a child and pretend I was a slave in the mines, but I don't think that was for hurt/comfort, so far as I recall -- it was just for the glory of grim suffering (and to see how long I could stay down there without suffocating :-p)
The 'rape romance' has been very popular since at least the 1970s (and probably since Mrs Radcliffe in the 18th century), in which a woman is carried off by a strong, masterful male (thus absolving her of any blame in the enforced intimacy) and subjected to a series of titillating indignities, until it finally dawns upon her and/or him that he is actually in love with her and that he will henceforth repent of all his previous copious liaisons once she confesses to returning his affections. Bondage/sadomasochism is currently regarded as a morally approved 'kink' that should not be 'shamed' (probably assisted by "50 Shades of Grey" and its precursors/imitators); the emotional equivalent of "he ties her up and hits her, and she is aroused by the sensation of helplessness" has been rebranded as dated and sexist, but they appear very similar to me. I imagine a lot of women still enjoy those fantasies, even though they have been told that it's not socially permissible.
Well, you're probably the only other person (besides myself and DutchS) I can think of who would actually have been eager to see my unpublished fanfic on Frank Capra's The Way of the Strong...!
(Did I ever recommend Underworld to you? I probably did.)
I had no idea either. I only ever posted on Wattpad because it was suggested to me as 'therapy' by a (female) job adviser who said she posted there herself; original fiction in her case, I assume, but I never really got beyond the limited fanfic section! I never got any of those jobs, but posting fiction about self-torturing protagonists was actually one of the more helpful therapy suggestions I ever received, with hindsight. It's one of the few situations where trying to make other people feel bad is regarded as a desirable talent...
I suppose there's asexual fiction, although I'd assume (and I may be wronging it) that that sort of thing tends to be about characters Finding Their Sexual Identity and Learning They Are Not Broken, rather than about the vast majority of bits of life that don't consist of people romancing one another.
I've found several times that it's odd how the impression given by something can change according to its context. A specific line of dialogue that seemed to be going into entirely the wrong place for the character can be salvaged by having the same words spoken with icy control rather than blurted hotly out, for instance, or a scene can take on different connotations by having it take place at a different stage in the plot.
The great art is in identifying what the 'wrong' thing specifically is, I find -- and, ideally, working it out before you've developed a whole lot of other stuff depending on the element that shouldn't be there...
From:
no subject
Bondage/sadomasochism is currently regarded as a morally approved 'kink' that should not be 'shamed' (probably assisted by "50 Shades of Grey" and its precursors/imitators); the emotional equivalent of "he ties her up and hits her, and she is aroused by the sensation of helplessness" has been rebranded as dated and sexist, but they appear very similar to me.
Well, you see, the difference between rape and kinky sex is that in the case of the latter, both parties consent and establish boundaries beforehand. The 50 Shades trilogy badly misrepresents BDSM as a whole and should not be taken as any sort of instruction manual.
(Did I ever recommend Underworld to you? I probably did.)
You did. I've just been a bit too mentally and emotionally drained to watch anything as of the past year.
You don't have any interest in sex, and I don't have any interest in romance. We can be dysfunctional in the eyes of society together. :P
From:
no subject
The point is that people like to read about and vicariously experience things that they wouldn't enjoy having happen in real life at all -- hence the popularity of serial-killer books, 'penny dreadfuls', 'True Crime' and misery-lit, etc.
Goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and the principle of catharsis, I suppose...
So yes, in the case of romances people --women -- like the image of the dominating bad boy who drags the heroine off to a remote location against her will (so she can't be blamed for taking up with an obviously unsuitable partner), enforces intimacies on her (so she can't be blamed for co-operating) and breaks her to his will (so she can't be blamed for loving him when objectively she shouldn't). You're supposed to want them to be together -- I think the whole idea is that the readers want them to be together and are willing the silly heroine to stop trying to rebel against what's best for her. In fact that was pretty much the assumption I was trying to subvert with Arctic Raoul, where I imagine most of the readers are going to take it for *granted* that Christine finally gives in to poor, sad Erik and takes care of him and realises that he is only bad because he loves her... or at least, subconsciously or not, are going to be tantalised by the possibility of that outcome being dangled before them :-p
Oh, I'm *interested* in sex all right. I just don't do anything about it, since the prospect of humpings in the abstract doesn't do anything for me.
I classify myself as an unfashionably monogamous non-practising heterosexual ;-p
(Which has an awful lot in common with Erik, as I'm well aware...)