I've been having this idea where the MC is immortal and has the ability to travel through time/dimensions and he goes through this one life with his friends and family and eventually he decides to move on. Except each dimension/each time period he goes to no matter where it is, the figures that become central to his life are the exact same people from his first, as in they look exactly the same yet they have different personalities, so his best friend from one can become his greatest enemy and vice versa. Or his friendsall act entirely different from how he knew them.The first time he flees almost immediately yet once he realizes he can't escape them he decides to stay and somehow try to adjust to these new people who look exactly the same as those he knew yet act completely different. It's an idea about the belief that relationships can transcend lifetimes, except in this instance they are, literally? Any ideas/tips on how to make this work/flesh it out?
Don't make the hero immortal, and how is gonna be able to travel through time and dimensions. Why does he decide to move on? How we make him unable to control going through time, that way he can meet his best friend, but he's his worst enemy. Thanks for the read! Let me know what you think.
Why does he decide to move on, maybe he has no choice? The MC could be cursed because he wronged someone. Now he is forced to live on Earth until the end of time. All his relationships eventually crumble since they die but he still lives, without aging. Maybe the MC tries to kill himself but all his wounds heal immediately within seconds. Regarding the dimensions hopping you'd have to develop that within the world. Meaning you have to create your own world, it's rules, foundations etc. You don't create from scratch but base it on the real world with supernatural capabilities. Perhaps he could control when he hops dimensions but doesn't know where he lands. To create conflict how about make his best friend the antagonist?When he hops into this new dimension, his best friend ain't such a nice guy. Or maybe, his best friend is just like him. A cursed Immortal and they have to face the trials and tribulations of a never ending life and all the chaos it brings with it. Tell me what you think those are just my thoughts.
Immortality does work especially well when said immortal is confronted to the deaths of other people (think Doctor Who!) There probably are other ways of using it but that was the first to spring to mind (so probably not the best As for the part about relationships through lifetimes, I've got to point out the book and movie Cloud Atlas. I do have to mention, I would find it a bit weak if a time-traveling, plane-shifting immortal character's only obstacle were to overcome the fact that the guy who once slept with his wife and killed his dog wanted to take him to dinner and a movie... and vice-versa. Why would he now have a greatest enemy where all he used to have were friends and a family? How about him, does he also exist in this other dimension, except it's not really him but a different version of him he's gonna meet? What changed between "he decides to leave his original friends and family" and "he decides to stay with the twisted version of his former friends" ? Unless they were all stuck together in a 1-kilometer wide dimensional pit, I don't see what could force him to stay, as far as I know he could just walk away and find his own piece of twisted-version earth and built his own twisted-version hut if he really wanted to. Does he have a moral obligation to stay? There are many, many other questions you should ask yourself before or as you dive in. The better you know your settings and your characters, the easier it is to come up with the perfect obstacles for each of them. This, of course, can also come while you're writing. The last thing you want is to lose those creative juices to a possibly tedious session of overthinking.
As a reader, I'd be looking for an explanation. Why do his new acquaintances look exactly like his old ones? I'd be disappointed if no explanation were given. I'm not seeing how relationships would transcend lifetimes if the new people behave differently to the old ones. You could write this story with no supernatural content at all, just have a very mortal MC move from place to place, having some kind of adventure in each one but never being satisfied with his life there. You could have him see similarities between the new people he meets and those he used to know and this causing him to make false assumptions about them, which would then lead to tensions in their relationships. You may not discover what this story is really about until you finish the first draft. I suspect it will be about people and their relationships so you probably won't need a time travelling immortal being to do this.
Sounds like groundhog day, with added feature of alternate dimension. So each time you find the same people but in an alternate universe, they can be polar opposites. It's important to explain how and why it works, otherwise your audience may be rather annoyed. You could also make your novel something of a "you choose your own ending" gimmick. Say, the person has the ability to twist time and space as they desire, and each time they change the universe around them for a whimsical desire, the same people and surroundings tend to change. You may add a rule to make it more challenging--for instance, nothing can be reversed. It may sound a bit like Steins;Gate, if you've seen the anime, but it would make something interesting.
It could be like the film 'The Butterfly effect' where the MC goes back in time to his own childhood, to do something differently, and then, on his return to the present, finds that change has had a drastic effect on his friends and family.
