In spring of 2019, Sophia Fowler ’22 stumbled upon a website called Wattpad–a social storytelling platform. A week later she started writing her own stories, in total composing three published pieces of work adding up to the equivalent of a 766-page novel. Today she has a story with over 367,000 views.
“Basically the start of Wattpad for me was to make fun of fan fiction–Wattpad is mainly known for having very bad fan fiction– so my intention was to laugh at those stories,” Fowler said, “A lot of people start out this way. A lot of stories are unfinished on Wattpad, so I started to create these alternate endings in my head and then eventually made an account and wrote them out. It slowly became an absolute addiction. I thought about it all day and would write for hours. COVID may have been the best thing to ever happen for my writing due to the fact I had nothing to do all day, so I spent all this time writing these stories. I loved it, and I couldn’t get enough.”
Fowler now spends time creatively writing every day. Her father, Craig Fowler, started to notice his daughter would disappear for hours and started to wonder what she was up to.
“I believe Sophia is a wonderful writer who can communicate clearly while presenting points crisply through a story.” C. Fowler said. “I found out about (her passion for writing) three years ago when I started wondering what she was doing when she disappeared to her room and was quiet for hours. I was worried she might be depressed, but she told me she was writing. At first, I thought she was lying… But I knew she wasn’t on Snapchat or TikTok because she wasn’t bursting into laughter every five minutes.”
S. Fowler’s best friend, Neilla Amore ’22, who also occasionally goes on Wattpad, mentioned how one day, she discovered a story that S. Fowler wrote. They have been best friends since almost 8th grade and S. Fowler told us Niella was the best person to talk to about her.
“I think it’s funny how I found her story in the first place,” Amore said. “She didn’t want anyone who knew her to see what she wrote, but she wanted to talk about it. She talked vaguely; it would have been very hard to find it with the few details she gave me. We made a bet that I wouldn’t be able to, and we thought she was going to win for a while. Then she (sent me a Snapchat) about the amount of views it had gotten and blurred out the username, title and the link, but not a commenter’s username. I went and backtraced it until I found her story, and once I let her know, I’ve been put under oath not to share it with anyone else.”
Wattpad has changed S. Fowler’s life forever. She has found her passion and plans to keep writing, hopefully eventually pursuing a degree in English in college. She continues to find new ways to express her passion for writing, however still thanks Wattpad for putting her where she is now.
“I think it took me almost a total of ten months to write my most viewed story, and during this time I was also writing different little stories while balancing life,” Fowler said. “I stopped writing (on Wattpad) in June 2020, and it took a couple months to realize the platform was not the place for me, but it did make me the writer I am today. I have now moved on to better platforms such as Tumblr, which is much harder competition and gives me a challenge. I would not have been the person today if it wasn’t for Wattpad. I plan to go to college to pursue this to remain true to myself. I will forever be grateful for this discovery.”