She is 22 years old and has more than 347 million readings: Joana Marcús responds to those who say that Wattpad “is not literature”

Very shy at first, Joana gains confidence after a couple of questions from El Comercio and speaks affectionately about the trade that has kept her busy in recent years. The young Mallorcan he plunged into Wattpad at just 11 years old to write short stories. It took two years for Joana to dare to write a book. “Irresistible proposal” was the title of that first story that is no longer available.

Some time later the idea for “Before December” would arrive, the first book in the “Months by your side” saga. Joana Marcús was used to the typical adolescent story of the bad boy and the good girl. And she can’t deny that she loved it. Although, she wanted to put a different spin on it. And so the adolescent romance novel arose where the protagonists, Philology student Jenna Brown and Audiovisual Communication student Jack Ross, will meet in the least expected circumstances. But, according to the author herself, they will establish a relationship where she will learn to find herself and he will know what it is to love someone else.

“Since I didn’t find anything similar to read, I said ‘I feel like writing it myself, let’s see what comes out, let’s see if someone reads me.’ He didn’t have much hope either. So, I took all the bad boy elements and put them ‘in check’”, said the author. A response that, it is worth saying, is very similar to what other creators of the platform have told this newspaper in repeated interviews, that they started writing to “create stories that have not been published”. Faced with the question, the Mallorcan was “in check” and assured that everything depends on each author really wanting to show themselves to the world and, therefore, not letting a possible good story get lost.

“In the end (the decision to start writing) is what inspires us. You don’t always write things you’d like to read, but you’re doing it. I think it’s very interesting to have the option, if I can’t find it, to be able to write it. (…) For me, for example, the inspiration of the moment works a lot. First I establish the characters that I want and I create the world around them. Many times they are personal experiences that you want to express, you simply want to tell the world something ”, stressed.

Be your own editor

Wattpad writers, in addition to devising the “plot twists” (plot twists) of their stories, reread the manuscripts in search of continuity or spelling errors. This process, for Joana Marcús, was very bearable.

The young Spanish believes that she was not alone on Wattpad, because she always received feedback from her thousands of readers. “It’s like having hundreds of editors telling you what they think at once. That is precisely what makes you feel very accompanied in the writing process and that later, when you work with a professional editor, you are more open to recommendations or criticism”he stressed.

Likewise, he emphasized that, in more formal matters such as grammar, the essential thing is to read other authors. “When you read is when you learn to write the most. I think that there is no greater teacher than another book because it teaches you where to put the points, where to put the sentences and the paragraph separations. All these things that seem silly and that, in the end, mark the quality of your story beyond the plot, the visual quality that you are presenting to your reader”he acknowledged.

Upon moving to the Penguin Random House publishing house, in charge of publishing “After December, Joana Marcús had two editors as part of her team. Work started in late 2020 and everything had to be done remotely due to the pandemic. “We understand each other perfectly with my editors and, most importantly, they perfectly understand my books, the characters, what I want to convey and they can always add that touch to make a scene perfect. It was immediate chemistry to understand each other perfectly”, clarified.

Lastly, Joana Marcús gave her opinion about being stigmatized for being a Wattpad writer, due to the prejudice that exists around the platform and the belief that the books published there are bad. “I think that simply because you are a young girl who writes for young people you already have a lot of prejudices (about yourself) and there are a lot of people who consider that what you write is not literature.. But, there are also many more people who consider that what you are doing is good and worthwhile, so the important thing is to focus on that.”ended.