One of my favorite exercises for characterization I learned from a quick craft class led by the author Danzy Senna: Start a series of sentences about the same character with “S/he/they were the kind of person who . . .” One of the best things about this exercise is that as you exhaust what you already know (both personally and culturally) about what kind of character the character is, you get to really interesting discoveries about what makes your character a “kind.”
