Originally Posted by E.M.DuBois
For a time, I was really paranoid about my work being compared to Harry Potter or Star Wars, and therefore scrapped entire works from my Apocalypse Chronicles Series just because of that. I wanted to be unique and unprecedented in my work. By the time I was done cutting how anything that sounded familiar to either two titles, I was left with a few paragraphs of the first novel. Throw Supernatural into the mix, and I couldn't have even hade those paragraphs. 
But then I did things like watched the intros to the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy and other documentaries about it, as well as really delved into the lore Rowling based her novels on. Heck, Lucas had gone through a hundred convolutes and weird (even for Star Wars) ideas before settling on what the Force was. And Rowling cherry-picked Merlin's mythology to make it seem less Christian so it'd fit into the world she was creating. It occurred to me that I could use the elements I had wanted to, and still make them unique enough to distinguish from titles that had been done before.
Now I'm not as afraid to be compared to other authors, because I know what sets me apart from them. I'd rather not be, but I definitely don't feel the need to have my work compared to theirs to falsely lure in an audience. |