Have you ever had one of those moments, where everything seems to be clicking only for it to be shut down by a single thought from either your own mind or just someone else, usually along the lines of "so it's like [name of popular novel/film/TV show]?"
I've just had one, and it really made me face-palm twice for incredibly stupid reasons. The first because such an event ever took place, the second because it's annoyingly obvious now someone's mentioned it to me.
Basically, I've kind of decided that instead of trying to be overambitious with my first written works, I'd play it small at first. Trying to put vast, winding inter-connecting stories together in a grand trilogy is kind of difficult when you have yet to write a single complete narrative that wasn't just erotic wish fulfilment from a lonely teenager *shifty eyes*.
'Twas to be a simple tale at heart: a walled-off, very conservative society has very strict anti-magic laws, but then the MC exhibits accidental magical powers and the government immediately decides the best course of action would be to banish him to the wild untamed lands beyond their borders, never to return. So he gets dumped in a forest and left to fend for himself and eventually die, when he is rescued from an animal attack by a family of forest-dwelling druid folk. They take him back to their village and he spends a while learning the ways of druid magic, forming friendships, getting a boyfriend (because my MCs seem doomed to always be gay) and etc. But MC misses his old life, particularly his best friend, so he uses his new-found magical abilities to sneak back past the wall and see her. He gets discovered by sentries on the way out again, and this is misconstrued as an act of aggression. So the government reacts the only way it really knows how: let's just kill them! Their scout groups are attacked and repelled, but this only spurs them on and they threaten to return with a rather large army. With the hostility declared, the MC must decide whether to try and return to his old life and thus leave the druids to most likely be slaughtered, or fight alongside them and totally abandon all possibility of ever going back to how things were.
So it's a fairly simple story. But then one sentence destroyed it: "So it's kind of like Avatar then?".
And she was right. MC leaving a strong, advanced society to join a simple nature-related civilisation, but then must choose his allegiance and either fight against, or for, his old society.
Now I know Avatar at its heart is by no means an original story and at this point anyone that makes the Dances with Wolves comparison should probably be taken out Old Yeller style, but this still really annoyed me.
So basically, has anyone had a significant moment like this? And how did you manage to move past it and just keep working despite the constant annoyance of knowing people might compare your work to something wildly successful.
I've just had one, and it really made me face-palm twice for incredibly stupid reasons. The first because such an event ever took place, the second because it's annoyingly obvious now someone's mentioned it to me.
Basically, I've kind of decided that instead of trying to be overambitious with my first written works, I'd play it small at first. Trying to put vast, winding inter-connecting stories together in a grand trilogy is kind of difficult when you have yet to write a single complete narrative that wasn't just erotic wish fulfilment from a lonely teenager *shifty eyes*.
'Twas to be a simple tale at heart: a walled-off, very conservative society has very strict anti-magic laws, but then the MC exhibits accidental magical powers and the government immediately decides the best course of action would be to banish him to the wild untamed lands beyond their borders, never to return. So he gets dumped in a forest and left to fend for himself and eventually die, when he is rescued from an animal attack by a family of forest-dwelling druid folk. They take him back to their village and he spends a while learning the ways of druid magic, forming friendships, getting a boyfriend (because my MCs seem doomed to always be gay) and etc. But MC misses his old life, particularly his best friend, so he uses his new-found magical abilities to sneak back past the wall and see her. He gets discovered by sentries on the way out again, and this is misconstrued as an act of aggression. So the government reacts the only way it really knows how: let's just kill them! Their scout groups are attacked and repelled, but this only spurs them on and they threaten to return with a rather large army. With the hostility declared, the MC must decide whether to try and return to his old life and thus leave the druids to most likely be slaughtered, or fight alongside them and totally abandon all possibility of ever going back to how things were.
So it's a fairly simple story. But then one sentence destroyed it: "So it's kind of like Avatar then?".
And she was right. MC leaving a strong, advanced society to join a simple nature-related civilisation, but then must choose his allegiance and either fight against, or for, his old society.
Now I know Avatar at its heart is by no means an original story and at this point anyone that makes the Dances with Wolves comparison should probably be taken out Old Yeller style, but this still really annoyed me.
So basically, has anyone had a significant moment like this? And how did you manage to move past it and just keep working despite the constant annoyance of knowing people might compare your work to something wildly successful.
