26 Jun 2012 01:28:59
As of today, there's a new member of the social-reading website Wattpad, alongside the likes of misstwinkletoes, bacutie4eva and xoStardust: the Booker prize-winning author Margaret Atwood.
Atwood has signed up to Wattpad to share her writing with its online community of nine million other users. Describing herself as "a writer since 1956" on her online profile, Atwood has posted two new poems on the website, is planning to share a piece of fiction this autumn and will also be the final judge of a poetry contest to be held in July.
Her work is already finding fans on Wattpad. The poem Update on Werewolves, in which she explores the world of the female werewolf – "Tomorrow they'll be back / in their middle-management black / and Jimmy Choos / with hours they can't account for / and first dates' blood on the stairs" – was met with the accolade: "The second stanza was a total giggle" from one user, and praised with "a change from the usual werewolves I see here" by another. Her poem Thriller Suite also went down well with Wattpad users. "So vivid. Lurid!" wrote Saraleee. Jamilla_ wasn't sure she understood it, but liked it "all the same".
"I didn't think they were going to disapprove," said Atwood. "I've already looked at quite a bit [of writing] on the site but haven't commented yet. I think it would be too crushing for me to comment. Out of millions of users, how am I going to single somebody out? It's enough to judge the poems."
She will, she said, be listening to feedback from her readers, however. "I think any feedback is interesting, and this is not your usual poetry reading group," she said. "This is nothing new. [It's] simply being reinvented by the internet ... The Pickwick Papers was published serially and people would respond to the chapters by letter. That's why Sam Weller became such a big part of the book."
Wattpad allows its users to share their work chapter by chapter, with reader comments helping to shape plotlines. It currently plays host to over five million stories in 25 languages, with more than 500,000 new stories and poems added every month, across genres from romance to science fiction.
Atwood's digital experiments already include a recent story on Byliner.com, to which she has two sequels planned, and the launch of her own start-up, Fanado, an online events space. The author of The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace said she was moved to sign up to Wattpad to encourage young writers.
"How do young people get their practice in?" she said. "We did it through the high school magazine, but it was an embarrassing thing because your real name was on it. On Wattpad you can put your real name or have a pseudonym, which a huge number do. Then you can get out there, get feedback, but not have that horrible expectation of people jeering at school. It's actually a pretty pure way of getting a readership that's not going to look at anything but your writing."
And even though Atwood is publishing her work on the site for free, she doesn't think her publishers should be too concerned by her latest digital foray. "I think they should feel nervous about the whole internet, which they do, but the thing is I don't see this as cutting in to them in any way, I see it as encouraging reading and writing. You do hear a lot that people aren't going to read and write anymore, they are just going to play video games. And if we don't encourage young readers and writers, we aren't going to have older ones later," she said.
All her digital experiments, the author said, are attempts to answer the same question: "how do we encourage literacy in this world?", because she is "one of those people who think that literacy is essential to whatever vestiges of democracy we have".
