Incongruity

One of the pleasures of creative writing is to create characters with incongruous characteristics. The sweet old lady who turns out to be an assassin, say, or the young blonde-haired toddler who turns out to possessed. TASK Choose someone you know and impose upon them a whole new set of characteristics. If they're gentle, make them feisty; if they don't smoke, make them a chain smoker; if they dress casually, put them in fancy togs. Spend 10 minutes describing them in detail, as if introducing them as a character in your next story.