Head-hopping is a subject I’m often asked about and it’s one of the easiest and most frequently made mistakes by an author. Additionally, it’s something which can all too easily slip through the net for an editor. Particularly if the story is so gripping and immersive, or if there are too many other issues to worry about. But the role of the editor is to try and smooth or remove anything which might be jarring to the reader. Anything which stops that total immersion that the author’s story deserves.
We all include dialogue in our stories and this is often where head-hopping is able to slip in. The author is the narrator of the story and will either be telling the story from the perspective of one or more of their characters in a cast of characters (third person limited), or with themselves as the main character (first person limited) where the narrator is the ‘I’ of the story. These are your characters, you’ve created them and you know them intimately and therefore, as the writer, you know their thoughts and what they’re feeling.
In a real scenario you wouldn’t know the thoughts in both characters’ minds. You would only be able to see from one perspective. This is where authors often get confused between head-hopping and third person omniscient. The way you differentiate these two PoV is by distance:
In third person omniscient the narrator is external to the drama – literally dictating the flow of events. They are only momentarily more connected to one character than the other, but primarily it’s a fairly dispassionate PoV. Here are two really good examples of third person omniscient, which can be compared with the closer third person PoV where head-hopping occurs:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket:
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.
You can see that the voice of the narrator is easy to pick out in both of these examples.
I’ll use the piece of narrative and dialogue I’ve used in my other blogs to create an example for you. Think about whose perspective the piece is being told from? The clues you’re looking for are:
- Does the narrative voice change? Have we slipped into one or other of the characters? That change in voice is the crucial difference between omniscient and third person limited.
- Is there any information which could only be known by one of the characters. For example, if you look at the action from either Simon or Maggie’s perspective then you can see that Simon would have been aware of his actions and posture to an equal extent as Maggie. Look now from Maggie’s side of the table and you can see that only one adjective gives away that this might be being told from Maggie’s perspective: anxiously.
Simon leaned forwards, his body rigid and shoulders hunched towards his ears, ‘Why did you do it Maggie?’ He jabbed a finger towards Maggie. ‘Why did you sleep with my best mate … and you stalked him. It wasn’t even as if it was a one-night stand,’ his coffee slopped over the rim of his cup as the table jarred. He didn’t notice, but Maggie clearly had. ‘He showed me the texts Maggie.’
She leaned back, her eyes went to the coffee pooling on the table before returning anxiously to his face, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I just … he got under my skin … I couldn’t help myself.’
It is still nonetheless a pretty omniscient piece, and you might argue that anxious eyes might be something that Simon or the narrator might notice and pick up on, so let’s introduce some head-hopping to make it really clear how easily this can arise:
Simon leaned forwards, his body rigid and shoulders hunched towards his ears. In that moment he hated her, ‘Why did you do it Maggie?’ He jabbed a finger towards Maggie. ‘Why did you sleep with my best mate … and you stalked him. It wasn’t even as if it was a one-night stand,’ his coffee slopped over the rim of his cup as the table jarred. He didn’t notice, but Maggie clearly had. ‘He showed me the texts Maggie.’
She leaned back, Oh, hell. Why couldn’t Luke have warned me that he couldn’t live with his conscience … her eyes went to the coffee pooling on the table before returning anxiously to Simon’s face, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I just … he got under my skin … I couldn’t help myself.’
Now you can ask yourself two questions:
- Whose perspective is the story being told from?
- Which character does the narrator want me to care about?
The answers are:
- It’s being told from both perspectives – we know how both characters are feeling, their thoughts and emotions. We’re privy to information that neither character has about the other. This is because the information about the situation they find themselves in, is going on in both their heads.
- You might say that the narrator wants you to care about Simon, but that would only be because he appears to be the victim. From this small piece, the story could be being told from either perspective.
The important thing about PoV and perspective is: in order to immerse yourself fully in a story, you can only tell it from one perspective at a time. Either one character’s perspective or that of the narrator.
You might want to have multiple perspectives in a story, so you can tell it from a number of different sides. But you will need to separate these, so the reader doesn’t have to read back to know whose head they’re in. This can be as simple as introducing scene breaks. But if your scene breaks come too often then you’re still head-hopping.
You need to cement the reader in the setting and character perspective from the outset of a scene and if scene changes are happening too regularly then you’re simply using them as an opportunity to introduce head-hopping. The scenes themselves become jarring – there’s no time to immerse yourself in one perspective before you’re ‘hopping’ into the next one. You end up with a story that is constantly jarring the reader out of that immersive experience.
The result will often be that they don’t know who to care about the most and will often end up not caring about any of your characters because you haven’t spent long enough in the head of any one of them to decide who you’re rooting for. Worst of all, a reader might discard your book before reaching the end of it.
You may be asking yourself: how does the reader of an omniscient PoV decide who to care about? With an omniscient PoV the narrator decides on the information they will give you from each characters perspective. So, in reality you’re being directed at who to care about by the narrator, because you’re hearing the story from their perspective, or certainly the one the narrator wants you to have in that moment of storytelling. From an omniscient perspective, the information you receive at various points in the story will be strategic to the overall plot
We will get rare flashes of character perspective through dialogue, but it should clear throughout that the opinion is either the character’s or the narrators. To make this easy, think of PoV as viewpoint and ask yourself: whose viewpoint am I telling this scene from? If you’re telling it from the viewpoint of more than one character then have you used an omniscient viewpoint? If you’re in third person limited with more than one viewpoint then you’re head hopping.