Vive la difference!

I’m putting two related questions and accompanying comments together in this post. On August 2, 2014, F wrote, I've found that over the course of all my stories, my characters seem to repeat a lot of the same kind of traits. Whilst I do sometimes feel like they're independent and distinguishable and have their own voices, I feel like their personalities boil down to be very similar, not to mention that these personalities seem to have, at their core, an enlarged aspect of my own (I guess I re...