Hey guys. I'm currently building a plot for a fantasy series in my head at the moment. Its going pretty well but I want to make sure this idea for the first novel would work. The story has 3 main characters that are introduced in different areas of the world (one even starts out in another world). The idea is that they each have their own story that makes up the whole of the first novel, in which they all end up in the same city/town/castle/whatever by the end. And when they get there they still don't even meet each other until the second novel. Of course I will have hints as to what the main plot of the story will be about (in fact one of them will be dealing with it almost directly). The question is: will this work , or will it feel too disjointed. I don't want it to seem like I have a book with 3 different stories just for the hell of it.
no one can answer that without reading how you've written it... the concept of three interconnecting stories making up a novel is a fairly common one, but is not easy to do successfully... if you can do it well, it'll work... if you can't, it won't...
Go read the Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Pretty much what you're talking about doing and, in fact, the rest of that trilogy (I think its called First Law) is basically the interconnecting stories of the 3 main characters as well. To answer your question; yes, it most certainly can work. I think the hardest thing will be the characters, coming up with fully fleshed out mains and side characters can be hard enough for one story, let alone 3. My advice would be to work solely on one at a time. At minimum you should have a plan for one character before working on another and, ideally, you should probably have a rough draft. It will give you a better feel for the story, for one thing, as stories tend to change a fair bit while you're writing them.
If that's the way you want to write it, then there's no reason to think you couldn't. As mammamaia pointed out, it isn't a new concept, but it is one that takes quite a lot of thinking about in order to pull off successfully. Another trilogy I would suggest taking a look at is the Bartimaeus Trilogy, in which there are three interconnecting main characters' stories almost throughout the entire trilogy. But it takes a lot of work trying to write three diverse, interesting main characters. You'll need to make sure they don't sound the same. If you are writing them all in 1st person or whatnot, you'll have to make sure they don't sound like the same person in a different skin. But the concept can be quite a hook if you know how to use it to your advantage. For example, you could have the stories of two or more characters *almost* crossing at several points. Something that happens on one character's timeline has repercussions, no matter how small, in another character's. e.g. Mr X has crept into a city in the dead of night and made off with several valuable items, killing a guard in the process. As a result, when Mr Y arrives at the city, he has difficulty trying to get past the guards, who are on higher alert after Mr X's exploits.
