Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I understand the various perspectives that are necessary to writing, but what I don't understand is the 'sin' of 'head hopping.' What exactly is that? If you're telling a story in the third person omnicient, is it considered 'head hopping' to express what both characters are feeling at the same time?

It depends on how the story is set up and how smoothly it is done. If it is well established to be 3rd omni and done well, that is not a problem (tolkien is an example of this). But if you have 3rd limited with a different POV character every paragraph, that becomes disorientating. How to tell the difference between the two- narrator tone pretty much. Sorry if that is vague. To me, it seems like one of those things that either works or doesn't work- no real rule to say for certain without reading the script.

Narrative point of view is a combination of grammatical person and number, tense, psychic access and motility, tone, tenor, mood, and register. "Head hopping" is a bête noir for some readers and writers. What it is is flexible psychic motility. It's the free in the Free Indirect Discourse method, free to move about from focal character to focal character's thoughts and about the landscape in varying narrative distances.

Multiple viewpoint characters make for a more complex story to write and to read than a single viewpoint character. Short stories usually have only one; novels' larger real estate allow for more than one. Ensemble cast novels, for example, depend on multiple viewpoint characters. Ludlum, Clancy, and Grisham are masters of multiple viewpoint character novels. A noteworthy example of the type is Clancy's The Sum of All Fears for it's deft handling of multiple viewpoint characters.

A general writing principle is to avoid depicting multiple viewpoints in close proximity paragraph-wise. Clancy's novel, though, flouts that convention, in some paragraphs clearly depicting multiple characters' thoughts in the same paragraph, as well as by subchapter and chapter breaks. It works because the story is milieu oriented rather than character oriented. A departure from Clancy's recurring protagonist Jack Ryan. I've found the same holds true for idea or event oriented stories. Multiple viewpoint characters in character oriented stories, though, are tricky.

Dave King has some insights into narrative distance as pertains to psychic access and motility and other insightful advice. http://www.davekingedits.com/pov.htm

For an in-depth exploration of narrative point of view, Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction reaches a height of detail and insight I've not seen anywhere else. Available at Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18961

Thanks a lot you guys. This really helps. I've been using third person omnicient in my fantasy series (first book 125,000 words) that is five books and about a dozen characters, and when I heard that it's frowned on, I sort of had a stroke.

I like to read and write alternating POVs with a clear break or transition in between, but I don't like "head hopping." I recently read Montana Sky by Nora Roberts, and the omniscient POV drove me nuts. I swear that every second or third line was from a different POV, and I often had to stop and ask myself whose head I was in.

as I recently learned, "head hopping" is just a POV violation. I.e., you are writing a chapter from Bob's POV, but you put in something that Fred knows - something that Fred would had to have told Bob.