After: From App to the Silver Screen

When Anna Todd first logged onto Wattpad eight years ago, she just wanted to read some fan fiction. On the app, users can post their own original stories, updating them as they write. Todd loved diving into stories of characters from Twilight or Harry Potter. In fact, she couldn’t get enough of them.

One day, when she had finished up all the Wattpad series she was hooked on at the time, she decided to give writing her own story a try.

“I just randomly thought: Maybe I’ll write one myself while I wait for these writers to update. A story or chapter just to entertain myself,” she says. A lover of One Direction fan fiction, she took inspiration from Harry Styles for her main character’s love interest.

She had no idea where the plot would go, and she certainly couldn’t imagine that the story would become the sensation it’s become today, with more than a billion reads on Wattpad, a published book, and a movie adapted from it.

After the first post, she didn’t know how many chapters it would develop into, but she says, “I just got addicted to writing it.” She began writing all the time, and because she worked almost entirely on her phone, she’d post from almost anywhere. “I wrote at the dentist, I wrote while pushing my son around in a shopping cart at the grocery store, I wrote in my room on the couch.”

The story developed around a young college student, Tessa, who fell for a bad boy with a dark secret. She titled it After, and Wattpad readers were intrigued. The more she posted, the more people began following and commenting on the series.

“The readers can comment on each line and each sentence, so you can see what they’re really being drawn to and which of their emotions are being played with,” says Todd.

In some cases, the reader feedback would inspire Todd to take the story in new directions. “I would read the comments of the previous chapter and start the next chapter,” explains Todd. “People say in the comments what they think is going to happen next. But then I was able to make sure that they didn’t guess what I was going to do.”

She finished the 99-chapter story more than five years ago, but the fanfare continues to grow. Not only does she still hear from readers who are discovering After on the app—“right now I have 36,000 notifications [from readers on the app],” she says—but the vast readership on the app caught the attention of Simon & Schuster, who published the book in 2014 and have gone on to publish several more of her books since.

Now, After has been adapted for film, and Todd has been able to watch her words transformed on the big screen. For her, the best part has been sharing it all with her Wattpad fans as she posts photos and trailers of the movie on the app and sees the excitement pour in.

Even though she has an ongoing publishing deal and her books are available for sale, she’s kept reading and writing for free on Wattpad, and she still keeps her original After manuscript on the platform. “It’s like this sacred emotional thing for me now, where I love going in and reading the comments and seeing people are still reading it.”

For her, the Wattpad readers are an important part of the writing process, and a part of the book itself. “It’s not just my story,” she says. “It’s mine and my readers.”

Wattpad - Read & Write Stories

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