Tag: point of view

“Head-hopping” Is Not Multiple POV

I just saw someone on Twitter ask a question about “head-hopping,” but it became clear they were actually asking about third-person shifting POV.* What’s the difference?

“Head-hopping” happens when the writer loses track of who knows what in the story. Not every character knows everything that’s happening. They know what they think, but they don’t necessarily know every other character’s thoughts, motivations, beliefs, and so on.

Multiple third-person POV, however, keeps the focus on one character at a time, perhaps chapter by chapter. Having more than one POV character is neither new nor uncommon.

It’s vital for a writer to keep characters’ thoughts in their heads, to be spoken by them when they decide to reveal them. Losing track can mean, for example, that the old woman on the street corner is thinking or saying things that only the young person down the block, whom she is observing, knows or would say. Let’s work with that for a moment. Sadie is waiting for the bus. She’s rolling things around in her head: the bus number, her destination, what she’ll do when she gets there. Down the block, the young person (male, female, enby, who knows, doesn’t matter right now) is watching for someone they’re supposed to meet. It may look, to Sadie, like they’re watching her. If she’s our POV character, we expect that her thoughts would reflect this: nervousness, perhaps fear, maybe curiosity.

If the writer has lost the thread, though, Sadie might unexplainably feel anticipation or excitement, perhaps as the person Jaden is meeting walks past her. She doesn’t know the person, nor does she know about the meeting. Sadie has no reason to react to the person. We’ve hopped heads. (This is a very poor, very obvious example. I’m not a fiction writer, nor do I claim to be. I’m hard pressed to remember a specific example of this issue; it’s been years, literally, since I’ve had to point it out to a client.)

It’s more than just a shift in perspective. It’s the information from one character’s perspective coming from a different character entirely, one who has no access to it. That is head-hopping.

If the writer has a handle on perspectives, the characters’ thoughts and motivations will stay in their own heads, as it should be. Perspectives can shift from chapter to chapter, but the characters still know what they know and not what each other knows. (Unless we’re in certain spec-fic settings, but that’s a different kind of post entirely. “Sense-8,” anyone?)

#AmEditing #HeadHopping #Craft #Writing #POV

*Edit: A few hours after I wrote and published this, I had a brief and pleasant chat with the Twitter user whose thread inspired it. As it happens, he was indeed asking specifically about intentional use of head-hopping. The commenters on that thread misunderstood and veered toward multiple POV, and a few of us were wondering aloud (as one does in tweets) what had actually been meant by the question. Regardless, this post is my perspective on the difference.

ESL and the pronoun

I’m editing a novel by a foreign author. His English is quite good (as one would expect from someone with a doctorate in media and communications), but still — I can tell he’s an ESL writer. The kinds of errors I find are peculiar, in my experience, to ESL speakers and writers.

Take the lowly pronoun “his.” This particular ESL writer often uses “his” to mean “belonging to the main character, the man whose point of view controls the narrative.”

The problem is, quite often “his” grammatically refers to an entirely different character, and when I dig into the sentence, that “his” needs to become “Name’s” (the name of the main character) instead to make the meaning clear. Let me see if I can construct an example. (I don’t have permission to use this author’s writing in this manner, so I’m going to create something that’s similar. Bear with me. It’s difficult for me to make this kind of error on purpose, let alone by accident. No bragging, just facts.)

They sat at the table, John and Sam. Sam could see the wound on John’s arm. John’s tunic was bloody from the cut, even though it had been stitched neatly by his sister.

This ESL writer would contend that “his sister” means “Sam’s sister,” since Sam’s the one doing the seeing. That’s not how English works, though; grammatically, the referent for “his” in this instance is “John,” since he’s the one wearing the bloody tunic. (And granted, it takes a little work to get there, too. I purposely made this a little unclear, to show you the issues as I find them in ESL writers’ work.) Even if we’ve never been told that John has a sister at all, and we know that Sam does, that doesn’t mean “his sister” always means “Sam’s sister.” For the reader to know without a doubt whose sister did the stitching, the sentence needs to read “by Sam’s sister.”

We had a rather lengthy discussion about POV when I edited his first novel in this series. It was difficult to persuade him that yes, English really does have rules about pronouns, and no, “his” cannot always mean “belonging to the main character whose POV controls the story.” Just because “he” is the one through whose senses we’re experiencing the events does not mean that “his” will always refer to “him.” That “him,” that is. I mean the “him” who is the main character.

See the problem?