I recently started reading Just Listen by Sarah Dessen and I noticed my story is coming along in a similar fashion. The plot is different, but follows the same pattern..
The last name is the same.
One of the names was IDENTICAL, until I changed it.
I wrote a poem once that kind of follows the same pattern of this book..
It makes me want to read more of her books, though.

i was writing this story many years ago, about the end of the world. When one day i was looking throught the school libary and saw a book i likd. i begin reading and within 2 pages the book was the same as my story. I had never seen nor heard of this book and it was the same dam thing! it pissd me off and i stopd the story.

This seems to happen to my friend all the time. Thankfully, it doesn't happen to me that often, but it's still annoying.

The fact is there really isn't such a thing as an original idea anymore. Even if you think your story might be original, the truth is that it probably won't be. And the reason for that is most creative people's minds work the same way and sometimes on the same wavelength. I created a character I was sure no one had ever thought up at that point, and then I read a story with a similar character. There were differences, of course, but the basic points were all there. I'm not bothered by it. These two characters grew up in completely different environments and have ended up on two completely different paths. I've accepted there will be aspects of certain things the same in a lot of people's stories. It just happens.

My "friend" who read my story once, too the copy, and finished it with another girl. She used it as a project in school. Funny thing is, the teacher wrote on the paper; beginnings great, endings sloppy.

I totally got plagiarised by Pixar!

XD

Also, it was really a visual character design rather than writing, but I'll tell you anyway...

In 2008 I took a summer job between my second and third college years making an animation for a local client. He needed the protagonist to be a tropical-looking lizard. I did some early character designs of green lizards, but they weren't brightly-coloured enough for him. I experimented with drawing styles and recolours, and he seemed to like the idea of a blue lizard with an orange head. So in the end we went with that design.

One or two years later, Pixar announced that they had cancelled on their recent movie, "Newt", which until then was in preproduction. They put the concept art and character designs on their Facebook page for their fans, and who was the protagonist? A very cartoony-looking blue newt with an orange face. My character's visual design was almost identical, the difference between them being their actual species.

It doesn't stop there though! Back when I was in school (probably about 13 or 14) I created a two-headed dog character. She was treated as two characters though - the left head was basically the "logic" head and was also devious and cranky, while the right head was the "creative" head and had the personality of a chaotic mad scientist. In Pixar's "Newt", one character (presumed to be the antagonist) was a two-headed snake where its heads had conflicting personalities.

I thought all this was funny though! And kinda cool that someone in an animation company I loved so much would come up with such similar characters. And I guess the other reason it didn't bug me too much was because it wasn't overly-similar either. I'd just had some ideas, and Pixar seemed to have the same ones!

There was also a time where a schoolfriend (when were were about 7 or 8) would constantly copy my creative writing work (mostly poems, but one story too). Fortunately, when it got so bad to the point where she was copying almost everything (claiming she wasn't because she would change one or two words), our teacher banned her from being allowed to look at my work! I think after that she started to copy someone else who wasn't so passive about it (from what I heard anyway). Whoops.