Give characters pet peeves. Put them in a situation in which they are annoyed by them and write about how they respond to them.
— www.10minutenovelists.com/top10tuesday-top-20-things-to-give-your-characters-that-will-make-them-more-vivid
Pet peeves work because they reveal character through friction rather than exposition — a person explaining their values is forgettable, but a person gritting their teeth while someone chews too loudly tells you everything about their control, patience, and history in three seconds. The reaction is the character. Try this: a meticulous librarian character who can't stand when people dog-ear pages instead has to watch a beloved niece do it gleefully, cover after cover, and the librarian's choice — to snap, to wince silently, to buy the niece bookmarks as a diplomatic workaround — shows you who she is far better than a paragraph on her love of order. The caution: don't let one peeve become the character's entire personality. If every scene detours into the same complaint, it stops feeling human and starts feeling like a running gag with a costume on.
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