Wattpad Pet Peeves

When the Author Keeps Adding More and More Unnecessary Characters

This is another one of those chapters where I made the draft for it about a year ago, so now I have to write about a Wattpad pet peeve when I have read any Wattpad books in over a year.

So let's see what I can remember.

This issue is very much specific to Wattpad. I haven't seen much of this in actual library books, so I'm really wracking my brain here to try and remember which Wattpad stories had this flaw. And it doesn't help that I'm still trying to abide by my rule that I don't reference specific Wattpad books, so yeah. 

I think if you're going to have a book with a lot of characters, then that's fine, so long as you introduce most of your characters in the beginning. The most annoying thing is when you're about to get to the climax of the book, and the author just starts adding in a bunch of characters for no reason. Like, your book has 30 pages left! Why are you introducing all of these characters now? Especially when the characters contribute NOTHING to the story. 

I think I want to do an example for this one, because I have a feeling that the few people who actually read this book find my cruddy examples to be the most entertaining.

*Example starting now*

[The book you're reading is about a teen boy named Jake (I'm making this all up btw) who discovers he can light things on fire using his thoughts. Throughout the story, he ventures into the forest outside of his hometown and discovers there are more people like him. We meet Alice, who can talk to animals, Trisha, who can fly, and Andy, who has telekinesis. The four attempt to investigate their powers, and they learn that the government is behind it all. They are about to go into a big fight with a bunch of stuffy old government bureaucrats.]

Jake's POV:

There's only an hour left before we have to confront the government. We've added a few more people to the group, because strength in numbers, am I right?

So, we have Marshall, my twin brother (who does not have powers and knows nothing about what the heck we're doing), Jean, Andy's fifth cousin twice removed, Trisha's parents, both her adoptive parents and her biological parents whom she's never met before, this random hot guy who will become someone's love interest who we don't care about, and lastly some random scientist guy who exists just to show we have credibility or something, but he doesn't actually do anything and he's just kind of there.

I think we're ready for battle.

*End of example*

Oh lord, that was terrible. I would be embarrassed if you found out how little time and effort I put into making that example. 

But what's even worse than that, which I don't think I can make an effective example out of, is when you think the story is going to end, but then the author adds another character and starts another subplot surrounding them. And the character is always boring as heck. And then repeat that whole process about three times. A lot of that just ties into authors not knowing when the heck to end their stories. Maybe the story is popular and they have something good going, but you've got to end the story somewhere, honestly. 

Just like how I'm ending this awful chapter right now.