Nothing New Under the Sun

Quite a while back, I started writing a serial which has since been titled Break to Bind. It started out on the William Gibson Board, then migrated to Dead Channel, where I update it about once every one to two weeks on average. It's not great literature. I joke that it's my un-illustrated graphic novel. I use it as a learning tool, as a means of forcing myself to write on a regular basis, to work through the types of scenes that I'm lousy with, to commit to continuing and eventually finishing a sizable work.

When I first started it, some people commented (positively) that it reminded them of Watchmen, the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. At the time, I'd never heard of Watchmen, honestly. And I avoided picking it up until just recently. I'm reading it now.

Holy crap, says the articulate wannabe writer, it's bloody fantastic. I laugh out loud, make the heavy-metal-devil-horns-sign at the book occasionally, and try to explain the genius of the climax scenes to my wife as she looks at me like she's humoring the nutbar. This is really good stuff. Dark, dark, terribly dark, but no darker than many stories I have to tell. Too bad I can't write them as well as Moore can, and I can only draw stick figures.

Anyway, there are certainly similarities between Break to Bind and Watchmen, but thankfully there's a good bit of difference. I'm not done yet, but I'm confident that some of the messages I'm going for, which are uncharacteristically upbeat for me, are probably very different from the messages that Moore is headed toward. The ploy of using narrative combined with occasional 'found documents' is uncomfortably close, unfortunately. I swear I just started reading Watchmen.

But thankfully, the similarities don't really bother me that much. I like my characters, I like what they're about, and it doesn't matter that a) it seems similar to Moore's story in some superficial ways and that b) Moore's story is infinitely better than mine. There was a time in my life when I would have said "oh, something similar's been done, and done much better, so why bother." I'm glad I'm over that.