I just finished the first draft of a novel I’ve been working on diligently for many months, and while I was editing I found that two of my characters, both whom I love with all of my heart, were oddly alike. Both of them were snarky, conceited, good in combat, and loyal to a fault, which also made me pick out a few cliches.

Editing characters so late in the game has proven to be absolute torture, so here are some ways to tell if your characters are too similar, so you can pick it up early on so that it’s not hell for you to change it when your manuscript is finished.

First off, I just want to tell you that these are my personal ways that I’ve come up with to decide if characters are more similar than the writer would like, and in no way am I demanding for you to change your characters to be more different if you find that they are, indeed, similar. 

1. Make a list of their personality traits

This one is an easy one to do right off the bat. It’s very simple, and if you think that two or more of your characters seem to be copies of each other, just make a list of their traits and abilities. If you find that all of your characters prefer/use knives, change it up a bit and have a character have a whip instead, or maybe throwing stars.

This is for general, overall traits, and this method has a few faults when it comes to the depth of characters.

*****There are different levels of certain traits.*****

For example, your character can be creeped out about spiders. This could either be just a slight annoyance, or the fear absolutely cripples them, making them useless in combat against spider beasts.

Another example is if your character is selfish. Are they selfish in the way that they don’t like to share food or weapons, or are they selfish in the way that they will desert their friends in the heat of battle just to save their own skin?

That’s why you shouldn’t immediately assume your characters are too similar just from this one list that you make!

2. Create a situation and have all of your characters react to it

If you really want to know if your characters are too similar, you’ll have to start going into depth. Now, as a fiction writer you probably enjoy making up scenarios, and for this task you have to have your characters to react to something. PREFERABLY NOT A SCENARIO FROM YOUR ACTUAL NOVEL/STORY

You don’t even have to write it down. Just think about it.

Here are some things you can wonder about your characters:

- What would they do if they were locked in a doorless room that had only one window, which was blocked by bars, with all their weapons taken except a butter knife? There are guards outside the window, and one of them has a weapon that looks sharp enough to cut away the bars.

- What would they do if they were about to be tossed into a pit of snakes?

- What would they do if they were knocked out and woke up locked into a coffin, buried alive?

-What would they do if they set out on a risky mission and all of their crew died except for them?

-If they could only save one, who would they save: their mother, their lover, or their best friend?

3. Write out a dialogue between the characters who you think are too similar

Write out a complete dialogue between all of the characters who you think are too similar, and have them maybe reacting to one of the situations listed above. It should be elaborate, complete with the actions that they do in between or during the actual speaking. Then, when you’re done, take away the names in the speech tags, adding person 1, person 2, person 3, etc. or maybe take away the speech tags altogether

Read it again and think of which characters would say what. If two characters are able to read from almost the same lines (lets say both Jimmy and Billy Bob can read from Person #2′s dialogue) then you might have a problem.

I can’t give you an example because only you know your characters’ personalities and what they would say, just like only I know what my characters would say, but I found that this one was the selling point for me in deciding that one of these characters has to be changed up.

Hope this helped!