Combining characters is one of the most important things you can do in revision. The more characters you have, the more diluted your reader's connection with each character will be. Deepen the reader's emotional connection to your main characters by cutting or combining the extras!
This works because attention is finite. Every character you introduce asks the reader to invest a little curiosity, a little memory, a little care — and if that investment gets spread across a dozen minor names, none of them ever accumulates enough weight to matter. Combine two characters and you double the screen time, the dialogue, the history behind their choices, which is what makes a reader actually feel something for them. Say your story has a wise mentor and a comic-relief neighbor who barely appear — fuse them into one wise, funny neighbor, and suddenly you have a fuller relationship instead of two thin ones. The caution: don't combine so aggressively that you flatten distinct roles into a muddled personality serving three contradictory purposes at once. Some characters exist precisely because their smallness makes the world feel lived-in.
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