![]() The world was big and loud and there seemed no escape from it. Sometimes I think back on those years and wonder at how dramatic I was, but the truth is that every small instance felt overwhelmingly large then. I was always on edge, always one wrong word away from bursting into tears. Puberty, school, and growing pains amplified that. Even before my teenage years, I had been an emotional child. Every broken friendship felt like the end of the world, every fight with a family member – outright war. I was finishing middle school when I found Wattpad, and I was at the most sensitive time of my life. What started as a simple place to read soon became more. I had relatives and parents of friends who had arranged marriages, and it was never like anything I read on Wattpad. It was always amusing to me, a South Asian kid, to see how authors would come up with scenarios to get white people into arranged marriages (to end gang wars, to pay a debt between business partners, and in one case, because the protagonist’s sister ran away from her wedding, and they needed a replacement bride). It’s funny, but a lot of the book titles then were simply tropes: “my brother’s best friend” was a popular hit, or “arranged marriage to my worst enemy.” I used to marathon stories under the latter category. While Wattpad had a number of stories, I delved into romance, my favorite escape. YouTube holes have nothing on Wattpad voids. It wasn’t completed, which was just as well, because I clicked on one of the stories on the side panel. It had dark forests and the protagonist was a dream walker with a very pretty name, although the name itself escapes me now. My first read was a teen fiction book: a supernatural love story. I still remember the night I found Wattpad vividly. The upside is that there were always more stories to discover. It was pure agony to find a story I liked, only to read five intriguing chapters of it. Before that, most authors had to write “COMPLETED!!!” at the end of the book title. My favorite development was when you could see if a book had been completed. I knew the people of Wattpad understood me because they had separate sections for “ Vampire” and “ Werewolf” stories. I was there when classics were added to their database, and when it was revamped to add genre tags. They didn’t look as gorgeous or well-edited as most of the ones you’ll see on the site today. Early book covers were enlarged pictures someone had probably taken from google images or Tumblr, sometimes without the title on it. I wasn’t lucky enough to meet the first version of Wattpad, but I did watch it grow. ![]() This feature is still active, although the list is better formatted. Whenever I read a book, there’d be a side panel listing similar stories. I remember the homepage had a selection of its most popular works, while a search bar let you look up the kinds of stories you wanted to read. ![]() The Wattpad of then wasn’t half as sleek and attractive as it is now. After long google searches of “read books online free,” I found Wattpad, a place where I could read stories that hadn’t been published in print.īased in Toronto, Ontario, the website was developed in 2006 by Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen. My school library, while stocked with a good collection, required sifting through, and I didn’t often seek it out between classes to find a book that could very well be a hit or miss for me. It should come as no surprise, then, that I quickly ran out of books to read at home. Growing up, I had been a picky reader, but any book that caught my fancy was soon devoured. I was thirteen when I first stumbled upon Wattpad.
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