I have a problem.
I just wrote a story featuring a first-person female narrator and… werewolves.
What am I to do in our post-Twilight world?
I began Morgan in college. Originally it was a story about a girl who breaks her leg riding her favorite horse. She fights her way back to fitness and…snore. Two pages in I knew I was dealing with overdone material. But I liked my main character, with her tough name, and big truck. So I never gave up on her entirely.
Five years later I opened up the story and it screamed at me: “This is a werewolf story, stupid!”
Yes, my stories yell at me sometimes. Don’t feel bad for me. I yell back. I don’t generally write fantasy, but there was something about this story I just couldn’t resist.
I came immediately to two conclusions.
- A story about werewolves is going to be in direct competition with Twilight. Especially since my heroine has a romantic link to one of the aforementioned loups-garou. (That’s French for werewolves, my darlings.) Another maddening, unintentional similarity is that my werewolves are good, not evil. Meyer did not invent the idea of the good werewolf, by the way. Just saying.
- Twilight is no excuse for me to abandon this story, because apart from the superficial they’re nothing alike. No disrespect, but I happen to like my heroine a lot better than Meyer’s. Morgan is a strong, ferocious, kind, independent young woman. The story is about her facing all dangers directly, whereas much of That Other Series features the Heroine being shielded by either a Twinkly Guy or a Furry Guy.
(If I sound like I’m whining a little, I suppose I am. But truly, that’s not my intention. I have tremendous respect for what Stephanie Meyer’s done; she’s built an empire and I hope she rules it with an iron fist. I will not play the tall-poppy game with other women writers.)
I have every intention of sitting on this material for some time anyway. As I said, I don’t typically write fantasy. Since fantasy is, stupidly, still considered “genre” fiction, and I don’t want to be a “genre writer,” I’ll publish something non-genre first. When I finally get around to the publishing Morgan, the Twilight craze will have died down—if only because by then all the movies will be out and on dvd. It may be five years before I send this story out.
Okay, this is my point: I love my story enough to be protective of it. I don’t want it to be, “Oh, just another girl falling in love with a werewolf, you know? Only this time the werewolf gets the girl.”
Oh, and there are no vampires within a hundred miles of my story. Because vampires and I do not have diplomatic relations.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Don’t worry so much, just write. If your story is good it won’t matter that there are similar seeming stories out there. It might even help, since Meyer’s books drew a lot of new people to the genre.