This is my challenge to any author willing to take it, for a multi chapter fic.
Type up the first chapter, save it to your documents as TWO separate files, this is really important.
Take the first one and type up your story as normal, when finished, post it and then go back to the second document, ONLY AFTER THE FIRST IS DONE.
Take the second document and type it up again from there, without being influenced by the one written previously, and compare the two. Post it if you feel like it.
This is something I noticed while typing up short stories for English class, we'd occasionally get partnered with someone, but if we took the beginning of the story home with us, when we met up the next day, the stories had gone in the same direction, in completely different ways. Something our English teacher noticed when my partner was sick, so we were unable to decide on which one to hand in and we ended up handing them both in. The next short story assignment she gave the class was the beginning of a story and we had to finish it on our own. Thirty stories with the same beginning, and not one of them had the same ending as another. Several of them were similar to a point, because we'd worked on them in class and people were sharing ideas, but after they'd gone home and worked on them alone, the stories were drastically different.
If you take up this challenge leave a comment, and I'll read it.