Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24172416-20151205191414/@comment-4715955-20151229133801

First of all, it's not the story itself, but how you tell it that's important. It took them three movies before they finally made a Maltese Falcon that was worth a shit.

I've seen cases of people who did something along the lines of what I was doing, but it always gave me a chance to make my interpretation more unique, or to flesh out elements that weren't as good as I had initially thought. That's actually one of the best things that can happen to you as a writer or an artist: "Oh shit, that project is just like what I'm doing now! What do I do to set mine apart from theirs?" The protagonist in my current book basically began his life as a Dr Who clone; once that dawned on me, I did everything I could to distance him from Dr Who, and as a result made him infinitely more distinct.

I was working on Carbon River when I discovered another person had already written a creepypasta about a bunch of teenage girls being terrorized by a wendigo. It didn't discourage me at all, though, because The Wendigo of the Hurricane is "Jeff the Killer" terrible and not remotely scary. Also that story's "wendigo" wasn't even a frigging wendigo, it was just some immortal jackass trying to be Jeff the Killer, with his own catchphrase and all. And every single one of the girls was dumb, disposable, badly written, and indistinct. Basically the story was the exact opposite of what I was doing.