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A character is a bundle of desires. (One could debate whether that is an adequate description of a human being, but characters are not complete human beings, they are artefacts of story.) When you create a character, you know what they desire, because that is what a character is. A simple character has one desire. A complex character has multiple and often contradictory desires. 

There is a certain logic to desire, and a certain more complex logic to the intersection of desires. Only when you put your characters into specific situations will you fully work out the logic of their desires, and thus discover what they will or will not do. Thus a character can genuinely surprise you. 

One of the most sure and fatal ways in which stories fall down is when the writer fails to work out the logic of desire for an important character, allowing them, for the sake of the planned plot, to act in a way that is contrary to the logic of their desires. I sometimes comes as a great disappointment to a writer to discover that the character you have created just will not act as you want them to act in a particular situation. Alternatively, it can sometimes come as a happy surprise to realize that another character, according to the logic of their desires, will act in a way that saves the plot. 

But in cases where the logic of the desires of the characters will not conform to the intended plot, the writer is left either to go back and rewrite one or more characters with a different set of desires, or to introduce incidents into the plot that will force the characters, according to the logic of their desires, to act in a way that leads them to the intended climax and denouement.