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Finding Comparative Titles to my WIP

I'm interested in finding strong comparative titles to my WIP, and hope this is an appropriate place to ask. The more popular and/or recently published the titles, the better. I'm only interested in titles that I can purchase as e-books from a reputable web site (preferably Amazon or Smashwords), but whether traditionally published or self-published doesn't matter.

The elements I'm looking for in comparative titles would include three or more of the elements listed below.

If some of your own titles fit the bill, I'd be happy to read them, but please be double sure you aren't forcing the fit. Someone did that to me once and after I read their novel, I felt I'd been scammed, which had a significant negative impact on my impression of the story and the author.

Desired Story Elements:

1. More than two viewpoint characters. Bonus points if they are not all of the same gender. More bonus points for more than one strong female viewpoint character.

2. Set in a fantasy world where magic exists and is integrated to some degree into the everyday existence of most of the world's urban population. Bonus points if the world's government is a hierarchical magocracy. More bonus points if there is some tie to Earth -- but no scenes set on Earth.

3. Gods exist and make appearances. Bonus points if they do little more in the story than talk: instruct, advise, examine or threaten. More bonus points if some of them don't get along with each other very well.

4. Reincarnation is a given in the world. Bonus points if at least one major character is identified as the reincarnation of someone who was important in the history of the world. More bonus points if one or more characters gain/have a personal awareness of one or more of their previous lives.

5. Much of the story takes place in an urban setting; it doesn't have to start or end in a city, but at least 50% of the story should occur in a city. Bonus points if the city is populated by humans and some other humanoid kindred(s).

Thanks for reading and for any recommendations you can share.
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
Hi!

I don't have a specific title for you, unfortunately, as your list is quite substantial lol!

But I do have a suggestion for you to take or leave as you choose.

If you are looking for stories that are comparative to your story, instead of looking at story or world elements, consider looking at plot elements instead. This is a suggestion from Blake Snyder in his book on writing "Save The Cat."

What Blake Snyder suggests is forget about the genre for a moment. Don't think of your story as a 'fantasy' or a 'sci-fi' or a 'contemporary drama' or a 'western'. Instead, think about your story in terms of plot.

He gives ten plot genres that almost all stories, regardless of traditional 'genre', fit into.

Monster In the House
Hero or team of heroes must fight to stop some sort of monster in some sort of confined space. Examples include: Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, Jurrasic Park, Nightmare on Elm Street, Arachnaphobia, etc.

Golden Fleece
The Quest myth. Hero goes "on the road" in search of one thing and winds up discovering something else - himself. Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Road Trip, Back to the Future, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and pretty much all heist stories.

Out Of The Bottle
What if, or wish fulfilment stories. Cinderella, Bruce Almighty, Liar Liar, The Mask, Flubber, The Love Bug, etc.

Dude With A Problem
An ordinary guy finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. Die Hard, Schindler's List, The Terminator, Titanic.

Rites of Passage
Growing up or coming home stories. Usually about a changing point in life. This is 40, 28 Days, Ordinary People, On Death and Dying,

Buddy Love
Buddy Stories, or any Romance. Usually, they hate each other, then they love each other, then they hate that they love each other, then they learn to love each other at the end. Or, in reverse, they love each other and are best friends, then hate each other, then learn to love each other again. Wayne's World, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Thelma and Louise, Finding Nemo, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, Rain Man

WhyDunIt
Not "who done it", but "why done it." A story about seeking the innermost chamber of the human heart and discovering something unexpected. Social dramas. Citizen Kane, Chinatown, Mystic River.

The Fool Triumphant
Underdog set against a bigger, more powerful and often "establishment" bad guy. Forrest Gump, Dave, Amadeus.

Institutionalized
Stories about groups, families, institutions. Almost all war movies or naval movies. MASH, The Godfather, American Beauty, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. Etc.

Superhero
Not just Batman. This is the opposite of Dude With A Problem. This is when an extraordinary person finds himself in an ordinary world asking us to lend human qualities and our sympathy to a super being. Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Frankenstein, X-Men.


Instead of searching for a story like yours, with the same story elements, try searching for a story with a similar plot line (even if it is in a separate genre).

I did the same as you, trying to find other fantasy books that fit what my 'world' was... But when I realized I was essentially writing a heist story, what I needed to do was research other heist stories. This made a world of difference in my research.
 
Of the ten plots you mention, Heliotrope, the one that best fits mine is The Fool Triumphant. I don't think of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter as being comparative titles for me, but this does help me focus my research. Thanks for the tip!
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
No problem!

The Fool Triumphant is a cool catagory! It can lend itself really well to comedy (Dumb and Dumber), or it can be totally serious and dramatic (A Beautiful Life), or it can be somewhere in between (Forrest Gump).

Here is an interesting blurb I found about it:

The Fool Triumphant

The bumbling dolt–the underdog–always manages to win. Forrest Gump is given as an example of this, but I saw someone else suggest that Life is Beautiful is also the story of a fool triumphant–while being set in the most unimaginable place possible for foolishness: the Holocaust. (While the “fool” dies in the end of the movie, his son survives, which was his real goal, so he gets to claim a victory.)

Another classic example: Rocky and Bullwinkle. Or Mr. Magoo. Or The Pink Panther. Or Dumb and Dumber. Obviously it’s a formula that lends itself well to comedies (especially slapstick), but Forrest Gump and Life is Beautiful are dramas, so it’s possible to play it seriously.

Blake points out that often the fool has a straight man as his sidekick or the person who winds up the butt of the jokes (often because he tries to interfere with the fool and stop him). The straight man often sees the fool for what he is, but can’t convince others that he’s really a dolt that’s incredibly lucky or riding on the coattails of others. (Think Inspector Gadget, who never realized that his niece and her dog were the ones solving all his cases while he got all the glory, or my husband’s suggestion, Get Smart.)

I would argue that there’s a secondary subset of this which is Dumb, but Not so Dumb. Your classic fools, like the Pink Panther, Inspector Gadget, and Mr. Magoo are 100% fools. But Forrest Gump actually falls into the Dumb, but Not so Dumb category because, despite the fact that he’s not smart–that he doesn’t get things that normal people get–he understands the things that are important, like love and friendship, and if people just take a minute to listen to him, they’ll receive really great wisdom.

Stop my momBlake Snyder was one of the writers of the screenplay for the old Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty movie, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and that’s arguably another Dumb, but Not so Dumb formula. Estelle Getty is the fool who cluelessly cleans her cop-son’s revolver in bleach (because it looked dirty) and meddles in his love life. But when she gets caught up trying to help her son solve a case, she smartly plays up her clueless old lady routine to trick the bad guys. So, like Forrest Gump, she’s at least partially aware of the fact that there are things she doesn’t understand, but she also knows what’s important, and she’s smart enough to take care of what matters.

As is obvious from the title, the requirement for this formula is that the fool must triumph. (What ends up happening to the straight man is anyone’s guess, though!)


I'm playing on this genre a little bit in my heist story about 17th Century pirates who have time travelled to modern day New York and must steal a treasure from the Museum of Natural History... but they are totally clueless in our modern world. They know nothing about modern day security systems or computers or busy intersections or angry cabbies. lol. They are so lost and clueless they have to enlist the help of modern day pre-teens to access the treasure.
 
Thanks for the additional info, Heliotrope. My story is definitely not a comedy. I've got underdogs working against powerful "bad guys," which is why the Fool Triumphant plotline may best fit my story. But I wouldn't consider any of the titles you mention as examples of The Fool Triumphant as comparative to mine. So maybe that's not the category that applies to my story. It's not Golden Fleece either, though there are aspects of it. There are also aspects of Dude With a Problem. This is why I'm having such a problem....
 
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