A featurette in today’s Guardian talks about the clothes characters wear, especially in crime fiction and thrillers: tweed, pipes, spectacles, trenchcoats, Faroese sweaters. Clothes make the man and woman, and clothes can also be great tools for revealing characters. You can even have some fun with the cliches.

This week, create a wardrobe for a character of your own. You could do this as a complete catalogue of a wardrobe or a dressing room, or it could be a simple pen portrait. Perhaps you can even put this character into some scene with action that somehow involves the clothes they wear. Go to town; think about brands or no-brands and fabrics and colours. Undress. Put on another outfit. Fetishise. Take them shopping. Dress them up for a day at work, or an interview, or a night out. Dress them to impress, or for seduction. (Always impressing the reader, always seducing the reader.)

As always, be concrete and specific.

A variation of this might be to do a makeover for a character you’re already working with. See how a new outfit might bring fresh perspective or adventures for him or her.