Giving Life to Your Characters
From the Grub Street Brown Bag Lunch Led by Becky Tuch

“Characterization means fleshing out the people who inhabit your fiction by providing them with physical characteristics, habits and mannerisms, speech patterns, attitudes, beliefs and motives, desires, a past and a present, and finally, actions. This last attribute – how your characters act in a given situation – will determine your character’s future . . . and shape the forward movement and final resolution of your story.â€?
—Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter, What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers

Write a story (or the beginning of a story, or a scene) with the following guidelines:
1. Write in the first-person.
2. Assume the voice of someone of the opposite gender. (Men write from female viewpoint, etc.)
3. Start with the phrase, “Twenty minutes later . . .â€?
4. Objectives: Gain confidence in writing from points of view other than your own, and to make creative use of a starter phrase.