I always make a male and female character and give them the same name from my other games if possible (I gave them personality/backstories in my head, dont ask). And sometimes I make multiple characters from different classes, species, races, skin colors etc. and if I feel creative, their back story/bio. Helps if one is a creative person that likes to write stories.
One of my friends did similar, kept making different versions of the same character for D&D until he realised he didn’t want to play the character, he wanted to be him.
Which was good, because I found his character really boring next to stuff like the unreasonably sexy paladin, swamp gnome, or legally-not-evil cat. His PCs are much better now, the fire-fighting rat is very entertaining.