Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

I've been writing since I was a kid, mostly fantasy with some horror and sci-fi, and now that my patreon is taking off, I want to start posting my older works. The problem is that as I look back through the stories, I realize that I have a bad habit of reusing certain plot devices and character archetypes.
It's more than just a love of specific tropes and themes, and it's taken me a long time to even notice I do it, but it's like my stories require these similar components in order to function, even if the reasons and conception are entirely different.
For example, in a fantasy series I worked on through high school, one of the main supporting characters was a female archer, who I designed with a ranger-style/Robin Hood-esque aesthetic, and she and the misanthropic MC form a brother-sister type relationship, where she helps him reconnect with humanity.
In my current series, the MC befriends a woman who also uses a bow. I gave her the bow because the main love interest uses a sword, and I made her a lesbian because I wanted to give her and the main character a strong, purely platonic friendship without tainting them with will-they/won't-they tension.
Two women with different backgrounds, personalities, and strengths, but in the end, they are both, ultimately, female archers who form strong, nonromantic relationships with the main character. I took them on different paths for different reasons, but I still wound up at the same destination.
Does anyone else have this problem? I don't want my earlier stories to gather dust in the back of my hard drive, considering all the time and effort I put into writing them, but now that I've noticed this problem, I'm terrified of someone pointing it out.

I have no problems. Your characters are well thought out and they fit the story. It's not like you're rewriting the same story every time.

AJ

Eh. It is generally more believable that a female is an archer, rather than a sword or axe wielder. While strength is important in archery, in particular warfare (compared to target practice, or hunting some types of game).

Female archers are a Trope hundreds, actually Thousands of years old.

The characters you described seem to have sufficient differences.

Some authors make changes, seemingly just to be different and the result is a worse story!

Write good stories with believable, or at least entertaining characters. Plenty of successful authors write many stories with quite similar characters.

Think of all of the variations of Sherlock Holmes, in various books, by various authors, movies, TV shows, etc. Not to mention a plethora of Brilliant Detectives, most of whom have some resemblances to Sherlock. Many of those stories are quite good in their own right, even if the author "borrowed" (or Stole).

That was a problem that David Eddings had.

He achieve great success with his Belgariad and Malloreon series. But then he wrote the follow up ones Elenium and Tamuli, and in many ways they were almost the same plots as the previous two series.

For Howard, just like others like Burroughs they were only intended to be sold to pulp magazines, and it was not unusual to see one story in one magazine, and another story in another magazine. So reusing plots was very common, as say readers of one Tarzan story would read it in Argosy. Then a year later readers in Blue Book would read a different story.

This was actually very common in the pulp magazine era, and was largely unnoticed until later when they were assembled into books.

I've mentioned this before, but Clive Cussler is terrible for doing this, his books are pretty much the same story with different names. I read one, really enjoyed it, the second gave me terrible deja-vu and the third I gave up on about a third of the way in (making me very angry about his lazyness in the process. I vowed never to touch another of his books again).

Lee Child was starting to head that way with Reacher, until his son stepped in (But the quality dropped though).

On the other side of the equation, Bernard Cornwell should be guilty of this, given the rate at which he pumps out Sharpe novels, yet somehow he manages to avoid repeating himself.

As to David Eddings, feel free to correct me, but wasn't many of his novels ghost written by his daughter? Or was that Raymond Feist? Or, now that I stop to think about it, am I getting muddled up with Stella Gemmell....

Anyway, yes, I also have this unfortunate problem, and the more I write the more it's becoming apparent. In my case, it's 'angry young women' being the main character.