Here's my problem: I have three stories that follow the same theme of "Adult finds child. Adult protects child and takes child away from whoever is trying to hurt him/her." One of them is set in WWI in the Eastern front from the perspective of Vasily. The child he must protect? A German orphan who's parents had been murdered. (They had moved to Russia shortly before the outbreak of WWI.) The other two are Westerns. One is from the perspective of an outlaw named Mike Wolfletter, and another is a semi-illiterate farmer turned gunslinger. The child of the former story? A crippled Irish boy. The child of the latter story? A Native American girl who escaped the reservation. They all sound very intriguing to me, and I know they'll have to be three seperate books. I actually do want to write all three of them. My worry is that they all sound exactly the same just with a few minor details tweaked. Even if I made the protector a female, the theme's still the same. Is this a case of "pick the one you want to write the most and do it"?
It probably is. You can do all three, but it reminds me of Dan Brown. All of his books have the exact same plot with different settings and characters. It gets rather redundant. I don't know what everyone else will say, though. That's just my opinion.
Eh... if the plot flows differently, I think you could pull it off. And you could change the personality of the protagonist/antagonist and a few details here and there and perhaps add in a subplot based off of those details and the story will be significantly different enough from the others. If the way the main character goes about settling the plot is exactly the same though... then yeah, it would be redundant.
I agree with you three. I think this is a case where I should pick one that sounds the most interesting to me; write that and forget the other two.
at saying that Dan Brown is quite successful i do agree though, pick one, do that. You'll probably have a million ideas for variations throughout the first story, keep note of them. Potentially you could make those into the other 2 books, assuming you decide to continue with them.
I you are worried about being redundant you could always use a different a different pen name for each book.
I think you should figure out what it is about this theme that attracts you. You can do this by writing one of these stories. My guess is that once you've written one of them, and really explored the theme in it, you won't feel that it's necessary to write the other ones. You'll have learned what you needed to learn.
