Everybody is getting excited these days about head hopping in writing, and everybody is telling you how that kills a story. Perhaps, and then perhaps not. For inexperienced writers, it can be a trap, but if you know what you are doing, it can enhance your writing, making it more vibrant and rich. I am not going to dwell too much on this, as there are endless articles you can pick up that trash this topic to death. But I thought a summary would be good.
So what is Point of View? Most of today’s fiction is written in limited third-person. Pure third-person is when the entire work is narrated from one character’s viewpoint: ‘he did’, ‘she did’. Short stories are often written in first-person: ‘I did’. But if the writer is good, he would use the third-person. Beginning authors often use the first-person approach to tackle their first book or two, as the technique is easy to apply and the author can get on with telling the story. Call it a writer’s training wheels.
Limited third-person is when all characters are referred to by a personal pronoun (she, he, they) and each scene is told from one character’s viewpoint. The purists would tell you that you must not shift points of view within a scene or paragraph, but do it by creating a new scene either with a scene or chapter break. Most of the time, that is sound advice. But those same purists would lead you to believe that this is a grammatical rule that cannot be broken, whereas in fact, it is merely a convention that has grown over the years – one that many famous published authors ignore … to some extent.
I’m not going to talk about the omniscient third-person, where the unseen narrator knows what all the characters are thinking. This is getting too close to what is referred to as head hopping. Look it up if you are interested.
The reason an author wants to shift his Point of View is obvious: to let the reader know what each of his main characters are thinking. It provides clarification and understanding of character behaviour and motive, and brings density and a rich texture to writing. Unless the author is really skilled, it is difficult to describe every character’s feelings, moods, and behaviour from a single character’s viewpoint. The reader can miss out on a lot not knowing who did what to whom and who got paid.
This is where we come to the sinful part – head hopping. A reader identifies with a character the author introduces at start of a chapter or scene, and expects to stay with that character until the scene or chapter changes. Head hopping is where the author jumps from one character to another within the same paragraph or scene without first alerting the reader that he is now dealing with a different character’s point of view. That can be disconcerting, confusing the reader, making him wonder what is going on. The key words here are ‘without first alerting’! Remember those purists? Encountering a head hopping paragraph or scene would make them see red, and most of the time I wouldn’t blame them.
Okay, so how do you handle a shifting point of view? In any story, it is sometimes necessary to change a point of view from one character to another in order to maintain smooth continuity and enhance tension or drama, or simply provide an explanation for what is going on. To achieve that shift by introducing a scene break, as the purists demand, can be awkward and just as jarring to the reader as head hopping. What you need to do is make a smooth transition from one character to another by clearly identifying the new character to whom the point of view has shifted, and not returning to the previous character again within that scene! That way, you will carry the reader, leaving him satisfied and understanding what is happening. In other words, shift your point of view once and leave it at that. Doing it more than once, unless done skillfully, can come close to being head hopping.
If you are going to shift your point of view, it must be done for a purpose! Most editors will allow POV shifts in your writing without having a scene or chapter break, but you have to execute it well or the editor will tell you about it!
Don’t head hop!
