Chicken and Egg

Characters are shaped by their behavior. Lived experience. Hard choices. Hard knocks.

Characters make choices because of who they are. Likes, dislikes, priorities, weaknesses.

Who they are --> what they do.

What they do --> who they are.

A character with a personality and no lived experience is just an empty envelope.

A character with a really interesting life story whose personality only reflects the person they are now, with all the previous stages rendered irrelevant or inconsequential, is just a cardboard cutout. 

This brief & cryptic commentary courtesy of my starting-a-new-book-brain.