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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6572
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6572
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The answer is both, to some degree.

Yes, you should always be working harder on your character development. Particularly if you're a beginning writer, you can always work harder on everything, but developed writers have to work at it too.

Making all your characters yourself with minor differences is a problem for a few reasons:

1. You can't tell them apart. When Jon sounds exactly like Malcolm who sounds exactly like Kathryn, there isn't much flavor to the interactions.
2. There's not much conflict. If everyone agrees that throwing an empty cup out the car window is littering, you don't have any conflict, and conflict is what drives story (or plot).
3. It's hard to have a hero and a villain if they act like the same person and they have the same reactions. Hell, it's hard to have several heroes if they all have the same reactions to events.

Having said that, it's fine if _some_ of your characters have _some_ of your traits, and as John Smithers pointed out, you can't ever really escape your own head. If you want to create someone who has a very different life and opinions than you do, you will have to research the situation, maybe do interviews, maybe travel, to learn what that life or opinions are like so you can describe them from the inside.

Original score: 4