You don’t need to know everything about your characters.WHY?

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Perhaps of interest?
Perhaps helpful?

https://cirianne.tumblr.com/post/630304 ... ed-to-know

Because, unless you want to write out a coroner's report on one of your characters, it simply is not important.

Because you can invent details on the fly and incorporate them into canon as you go.

...and, through the magic of drafting, seed these details earlier in the story if they're important!

Though I think I may need to know more about my characters than most. I was working on a novel with a friend who's a more experienced writer. (We were in a band together- the novel kind of broke up when the band did.) In the planning stages, we came up with character outlines. A couple of paragraphs each, for about a dozen people. I found them immensely helpful- when I wrote those characters, they came to life in a way that I've never achieved before or since. Unfortunately, having suggested the outlines, my friend then proceeded to ignore them completely. The result was me doggedly continuing to build their personalities up from the outlines while he re-invented them on the fly every five seconds. As a collaboration, it was all a bit doomed and a crystal clear example of fundamentally different writing approaches.

So I think I do need to outline characters more. And also to world-build more- when I try to just follow the story and let the rest come as needed, it all feels paper-thin, a bunch of random names doing abstract manouevers in a vaccum.

Same here. I discovered a love of flash fiction (though I write short stories about my characters as well) for character and setting development. To say I enjoy those sorts of things is an understatement. I also can't seem to make stories work until I have a solid handle on my characters. I suck at improv perhaps

Yep, different things will work better for different people, and maybe even for the same person at different times.

Back when I was heavily into RPGs, and when the GMs would run long-term campaigns, the players were often encouraged to write a few short paragraphs on the characters' backstories.

Most backstories touched on most or all of the usual fantasy tropes -- only child, both parents dead, impoverished, social outcast, secret destiny, hidden powers, unusual physical features, cryptic prophesy, et cetera.  I tried to make my characters as tropeless as possible -- two or more siblings, both parents alive, middle-class merchants, generally well-liked, ordinary ambitions, a few well-practiced talents, ordinary appearance, well-defined ambitions, et cetera.

The real adventures were never in what the characters were, but in what they did.

Alone, special and despised for it seems to be a common-trope in the genres of fiction that appeal to nerds. Might this say something about how nerds view themselves within society?

Another argument against over-planning your characters is that you may cut off possibilities you will want to use later. In the first book of a series, you might give tons of irrelevant details about your protagonist's life story. For the second book, you have a plot idea that involves digging into their past with lengthy flashbacks... but the details from the first book just don't match the story you want to tell at all. So you have a choice between giving up or using contorted logic and unsatisfying retcons to force the story through.

On a different scale, I think that's what Tolkien did to himself with the whole of Middle Earth. The appendixes to The Lord of the Rings contained so much detail of the history of the Second, Third and early Fourth Ages, it became impossible for him to write a new story set in those periods.

I like to know lots about my characters. I'm very detail-oriented. Finding out lore for franchises is a passion of mine. There is the problem of cutting off, but I never plan to publish any of my writings, so I can change them at will should I feel I have made a mistake.

I like to flesh out my characters a lot, but to be fair I actually enjoy doing that. Whether that information gets incorporated into anything doesn't matter to me as long as I have it. lol

This may be another reason why Lucas started with Episode IV of his Star Wars "trilogy".