I’ve been having a rough weekend. I’m drafting Devil’s Blood 4 while reading the super awesome Throne of Glass series. I love the series so much – it does everything right. It’s made me fall in love with each character in turn, with the narration, with the world, with how the information has been dribbled out to me, how the plot has unfolded – and… I’ve been comparing it to my own writing. I’ve been coming up short.
I know, I know, comparing my books with a best selling series isn’t a good idea. But, with all the similarities between Throne of Glass and Devil’s Blood, I almost feel like I’ve written a poor version of the series. True, Maas and I went in different directions, but it startled me into a sort of guilt/envy that we’d started along such similar lines. It stirred up all those feelings of not being good enough, of being sub-par, and of the fear of never being well-known or even moderately known.
I don’ t even know how one becomes known without throwing your book at people.
It’s frustrating, defeating, and depressing, and if I’m being honest, it makes me want to give up and lay in bed for a while, at least until the feeling subsides.
Beatrice B. Morgan 
A short story: while at uni (late 90s) I wrote a story for my creative writing genre class – it was about a town closed in by a dome. Guess who wrote a story so similar it was uncanny? Stephen King.
I think stories are out there in the ether and people pick them up (writer people, that is). That’s why I wrote this post https://cagedunn.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/a-muse-in-the/
But, we all do things differently, we learn as we go, we keep going. We write our stories, our way. I think I’ve also learned to not read stories in the genre/field I’m writing, just to avoid that feeling.
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I know what you mean by avoiding the genre. I did for a while, but then when I’d get asked to name a few titles similar to mine, I’d draw a blank. I felt so silly about it, too. And since I’ve started reading the Throne of Glass series, I’ve got about five seeds for other stories! Score!
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Yes, me too. I decided to take a ‘sample’ of my text and put it on the site that tells you who you write like. https://iwl.me/ – and then pick one or two of the books by those authors (that I know, like, and might do the trick! – and do it with a few different zones from your story – it will be a different author!). Hope it helps/saves you work.
The Score – we can’t help it; everything leads on to somehing else, something extra; it’s just the way we are. Isn’t it great?
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