Making Characters: By Actions

I've heard it said that actions speak louder than words. In theory, if you want to know who a person is, you would be best off observing their actions. I have mixed feelings about this in real life, but as a tool for creating characters, it can be useful.

This goes along with my idea of starting vague. Start with a blank slate character, make them do some actions, and build from there. Everything happens for a reason, so whatever actions a character takes have some rationale. If you give a character some seemingly random characteristics, you can then try to figure out what would make those characteristics occur.

Similarly, I have sometimes created characters by thinking of a habit and considering what causes it. For example, most people are afraid of the rain. When storm clouds are overhead, people wrap themselves up as tight as possible. When rain is falling, they either don't go outside or will literally run from one roof to another. Other people, though, love the rain. They embrace it and run outside during a storm to play outside and jump in puddles. Both of those people looks at the other like they are weirdos.

I wonder what causes each of these personalities. Why does a person, who is made up of at least 70% water, who takes showers in falling water, absolutely hate the water? The common response is that they hate being wet, but there has to be more than that. Why does a person, who spends the vast majority of life being dry on dry land, only getting wet to get clean (and immediately drying off) love the water so much?

People think and do very strange things at times. But these things are expressions of who we are, even when we don't mean them to be. People can be defined by their actions, so creating characters that way is a great technique.