Learning the specifics of your characters is important before you put pen to paper. You might be able to recite certain speeches you want them to deliver, or their motivations and backstory, but is that enough?
Those are your big payoff moments, but it can take sometimes 200-300 pages to build up to the earliest of those moments, and you need to build character in the meantime, before you get there. So knowing the trivia about your characters is important, also, and is what will set them apart from generic, indistinct stock characters.
Does your science teacher prefer to go bird-watching using field glasses (boring) or a set of Nikon rifle scopes? Clearly, the second option is more creative and unique and makes that character immediately more intriguing, even if you don’t yet know that his father beat him with a dead parakeet when he was 10, until page 354.
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