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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38556
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

# You have too many characters

As soon as your characters begin to resemble each other, you have more characters than you are able to deal with.

It might be a problem of having **more characters than the story needs**. Then you'll need to evaluate what roles you need and how many characters you need to fulfill them. Often one character can fulfill several roles. So maybe the two characters need to be **_merged_** , or one of them merged with another character.

This often happens when aspiring writers have a simple straightforward storyline that calls for a single protagonist and maybe one companion, but want to use a group of adventurers like in the _Lord of the Rings_. They have the grumpy dwarf, the wise elf, the honorable human, the mysterious thief, and so on – but what are they all gonna do? What do they say when they sit around the fire? How are their relationships playing out? If the story doesn't need them all, they will soon begin to resemble each other, because _they are all just aspects of the single protagonist that the story really needs_.

So if you are working on a team based story, I very much suspect that you have come up with as many characters as the team needs to write together, but haven't yet come up with a story that actually needs all these characters. What you have is like an online computer game that offers a hundred different characters for the players to choose from, but they all have the same goal and the same quest to go on, and the same tasks to fulfill.

What you may have done is decide on the number of characters based on the number of writers in your team and the writing process that you have agreed on, instead of developing in a _story first_ approach and deducing the number and personalities of your characters from your story.

Original score: 6