I've managed to mire myself in an annoying problem. I recently began work on a series of books set in a fantasy world. The third book is the furthest along, and I've written that my protagonist, a human female, has become the ruler of a race of mountain-dwelling humanoids. It all sounded great until I realized that my first book is intended to be the story of a woman who inherits the throne of a human country from her grandmother. Are these plotlines going to clash with the reader? If so, how do I avoid it?
If your plots are exactly the same, that's a problem. I once had a series planned where there'd be a whole bunch of stories along the lines of 'kid is obsessed with X, kid realizes has magic with X, kid finds magic addictive and uses more and more of it, kid has to flee and go into hiding after causing great destruction'. Of those, I decided to only write one - about a weather mage boy who makes a tornado and destroys half his town. I'm currently working on another story in that world involving two girls with a different variety of magic, magic with people instead of elements, for whom going into hiding isn't an option and they need to learn to manage their magic while staying around people. The story also has a different structure in that it alternates point of view instead of focusing on one kid, and enters their lives at one point instead of telling their life story from infancy. And it has detective elements, since the one girl is a mind-reading detective and the other one is a serial-killing necromancer that she's pursuing. Try portraying the same theme from a different angle. Maybe your second character has a very different personality - an overconfident, impulsive character will have very different struggle as ruler than a cripplingly shy character. Maybe one character knew she'd inherit and the other one is surprised by it. Maybe the first one already knew the culture, while the current one is having to learn it. Maybe the people react to their rulers differently - I know in history there was often resentment about a foreign ruler, so maybe the mountain-dwellers resent not having one of their own kind rule them.
Agreed. It's not the ending itself, which is natural progression (CONAN THE BARBARIAN becomes king, FRODO BAGGINS becomes a de facto God and goes off to live with the immortals, ARAGORN becomes king).
If you've noticed similarities then look for ways to change it up. If you give the exact same story idea to ten different writers. You will end up with ten different stories although a couple of them may have similarities. So look for ways to make the stories different.
Thanks, all these tips are really helpful. I think i'll be able to write myself out of trouble now! Both characters reached their thrones after a trial by combat, but one is a huntress and the "lost princess" type, while the other has been a noblewoman all her life and has only recently been introduced to the mechanics of battle. I hope these stories are similar enough to introduce a theme but not be repetitive to the reader.
