Head Hopping

 

By Thomas Kies

For the last few months, I’ve been mentoring a critique group that meets every Monday night at a local wine bar.  The perfect location for the perfect Cabernet or Malbec and pleasant discussions about writing.

Most of the members of the critique group are holdovers from my last creative writing class. Once the class was over, they surprised me by offering to pay me (real money) to run a critique group.  I declined the cash but instead said that I’d run the group on one condition—that they critique chapters of the book that I was working on at the time. 

They accepted and we’ve been working together and drinking wine ever since.

One of the more heated discussions we entered was initiated by a writer who has self-published four books (a series of mysteries) and is eagerly looking for an agent and a traditional publisher.

When she read chapters from her new work in progress, I mentioned that she “head hopped” and I couldn’t get invested in the characters. 

I had warned them that I would be honest in my critiques of their writing.

Head hopping is when a story or a chapter is being told from a character’s perspective or point of view and then abruptly, it changes, and the story is being told from a different character’s perspective. 

When I mentioned this, she couldn’t believe that she’d done it.  I took her chapter home and physically marked off all the places she changed points of view…sometimes in the same paragraph.

She asked, “Why is that bad?  How else can I tell the reader what the characters are thinking?”

Let’s start with why it’s bad.  For one, it’s distracting as hell.  One of the reasons I was having a problem relating to the characters was that I was never sure who I was supposed to be relating to. When I read a book, I want to be immersed in that world, which means I’m seeing it through the eyes of the characters in that particular scene.  

You can’t do that if you’re flip flopping from character to character, hearing the thoughts of different people from one sentence to the next.

I suggested that the writer show me what someone is thinking.  If Sally is having angry thoughts, demonstrate it.  Have Sally throw a coffee cup across the room, screaming words that would make a sailor blush.

If Charlie is embarrassed, have him blush and turn away, staring at his own shoes.

Head hopping keeps the reader from becoming emotionally invested in a character and, worse yet, is confusing.

So, can you change POVs?  Of course you can.  Especially if you’re writing in omniscient third person POV.  But when you do, you should do it in some kind of scene break or in a new chapter.  Otherwise, it’s jarring and confusing.

So, that was a discussion that lasted over more than one glass of wine. 

Same writer, different discussion was the value of plot over character.  We’ll save that for another blog.  That also was a two-glass discussion.