The writer of a novel must be able to effectively portray a broad range of characters, differentiating between how they speak, how they act, and how they think. Some of these, perhaps most of these, will necessarily be of a type utterly foreign to the natural mindset of the writer. The writer has many tools with which to portray characters; one of the most common and effective involves assuming the role of a central POV character during a scene.
Assuming a POV role allows the writer to get personal with not only the character portrayal and reaction, but also the perception of the scene. Getting into a character’s shoes affords the writer access to his thoughts and the ability to share those thoughts and motivations with the reader. The reader gets to be up close and personal with the character, understanding how the character perceives the world around him and empathizing with the character’s reactions. The writer gets to explore the character’s motivations and discover how those motivations interact with the larger world of the story. This technique both advances the growth of the character during the story and increases the emotional investment of the reader.
The most important challenge for the writer is “changing their character shoes” in such a way that each character is handled in a unique way. This kind of differentiation begins with the vocabulary used when assuming a POV, matching it to not only the perception of the characer but to their frame of reference and method of expression. In the Hunger Games stories, the stylist Cinna perceives even their political situation through the lens of fashion, and expresses himself with clothing choices and fashion references. In the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbits relate their adventures to Shire life, and most especially to food.
Writers handling multiple POV changes within a novel must deal with knowledge bleed-through, avoiding the tendency to have all characters react as if they had perfect knowledge of the situation. Much of characterization results from mistakes that seemed at the time to be the best choice possible. On the extreme opposite of this tendency, weakly portrayed characters blithely ignore relevant information when making their life choices. The writer must be able to decide how much information a given characer possesses, and then use that information in the most accurate way possible.
When a writer has trouble distinguishing character voices in the story, an intense POV scene may not be the best choice for narrative. This difficulty often manifests in uniform dialog or undifferentiated behavior patterns. The dialog in Joss Whedon’s series “Firefly” is clever and snappy, but characters all tend to speak in the same meter and with the same vocabulary. Teleplays have a visual characterization advantage over printed stories; the same exchanges on the printed page would be difficult for the reader to follow, as speakers would tend to blur together. In this case, a more nuetral narrator benefits the clarity of the story.
When changing character shoes, the writer must not only assume a new vocabulary, a new frame of reference, and a new perception of the world, the writer must also assume new physical behaviors. Incidental actions and habitual motions form an important part of a character, and can help differentiate between characters who possess otherwise similar outlooks and educations. Value systems form a link in this chain as well, not only ethically but with regards to the physical handling of objects in the scene.
Written characters can be unique or common, memorable or forgettable. The most important aspect of handling any character is consistency; as long as a character behaves the same way from scene to scene, the reader will forgive a multitude of both story and character errors.