Head hopping involves jumping from one character’s thoughts to another, and then maybe another, all in one scene. This could be confusing to a reader. I had fallen into this trap while writing the first draft of my first novel. Once the manuscript got into the hands of my proofreaders and editors, they all advised against it. Fixing this was really involved and time consuming too.
If you need another POV to tell the story, just use a scene break or chapter break. You don’t really need to have some obvious transition to signal this either, I think readers understand this device. But it might help to end the previous scene first, using a transitional line like: ‘After finishing what he said, Mike shoved the door open and stormed out of the room.’ So, in that scene we were in Mike’s head/POV and in the next we are left with another character’s POV who might have been sitting in that room wondering what just happened. There are infinite ways to do this, thus the joy of writing.
If you need to have some sort of overview perspective, omniscient point of view would pull back from any one character’s deep POV and give the reader more of big picture of what’s happening. I use this too, especially when the reader needs to know what is happening across town while the Protagonist is investigating or something. I like to call this a fly-on-the-wall perspective. The reader is given the freedom to eavesdrop on a scene unnoticed.
Point is, you don’t need to go deep on every character.
Think about it from a reader’s perspective, they are trying to absorb your world and understand the rules of your story so that they can settle in and enjoy a good read. If you jump from the mind of one character to another and then another, it will get really confusing.
Think about having a conversation with a group of friends and how overwhelming it would be to not only try to understand what they are saying, but also hear their thoughts.
I have come across several books with this problem. After a few chapters, these novels have left me feeling lost and I wound up not finishing them. An author should develop the ability to zoom out and think from the perspective of their reader.
Thanks, Gransom Hayes
Three Worlds Collide: Rise of the Demon Scorpion (A supernatural thriller)
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