I was rummaging through my medicine cabinet last night to make more room for my mother-in-law's prescriptions (running out of space in the bathroom for that) and found all kinds of things I should have cleaned out ages ago. My medicine cabinet is sort of like my closets. When I need them I think of cleaning them, otherwise they're on their own. I found old stuff I hadn't used in years like an old tube of preparation-H. No, never had hemroids. I got a tattoo several years ago (not saying how long because then you will know how REALLY long it has been since I cleaned that out) and I misunderstood when the tattoo person said what to apply over the fresh tattoo. Luckily someone stopped me before I spread that all over it. I also found a bunch of old diet pills, and some hair dye that was long dried up and gunky in the bottle. I'm surprised that didn't explode.
All that got me thinking about what my characters might be like. Do you ever do that? Wonder what your characters are like beyond what they do in your stories? That is something that could be quite useful. It makes for rounder, fuller characterisations. It could even provide some little 'quirks' you could give your characters to make them more 'human'.
One of the biggest drawbacks most new writers have is 'cardboard' characters. Getting to know them goes a long way to correcting that problem.
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