From the Technique section of section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells: “Head-hopping as seen by publishing pros.”
You see plenty of head-hopping in published works, and I wondered if I was taking the wrong stance in being so critical of it. So I surveyed a number of New York publishing pros—editors and agents—for their views.
An executive editor’s view of head-hopping
I share your peeve about “head-hopping”—apt term. So thanks for letting me blather on about it.
I think it’s OK to do it so long as there is only one point of view per discernible section. [RR: emphasis mine.] That is to say, so long as there’s something to represent to the reader that there has been some kind of jump. A chapter or a space break or something.
But when it happens in the middle of continuous action, it’s a serious problem. Basically, if you tell your story with recourse to everyone’s head at all times, you’re basically throwing out all the rules and permitting yourself everything. And if you are permitting yourself everything, then you also forfeit the right to hide anything of narrative importance—who the killer is, for instance—without cheating in a major way.
I’ve always tried to tell the writers that I work with that some kind of consistency of point of view—some ground rules that the reader can grasp—is an essential element of what is an epistemological problem. How does the reader know what he knows? Of course the author knows everything in advance—after all, he came up with the story. But he has to maintain the illusion that the reader and the narrative are on the same footing, discovering at the same time what the author has cooked up. After all, once the reader knows everything, the narrative is over.
Mystery stories are great examples of this kind of narrative epistemology. I always pointed out to the writers I worked with that all the Sherlock Holmes tales were narrated in the first person and by Holmes’s friend, for very sound reasons. Had Doyle used third person, a reader might well ask, “If you are employing the omniscient narrator, then you know everything, including the killer’s identity. In which case you should tell us!” Whereas by using Dr. Watson, he shields himself from this accusation. Dr. Watson can’t possibly know the outcome in advance, and so he reports on the action and shares with the reader the process of discovery. Watson knows enough to introduce Holmes to the reader, but once the story starts, he knows as much as the reader does.
With the advent in the twentieth century of close third person, the objection on the basis of omniscience is less relevant. A writer can use a kind of limited omniscience narrative. And I think that’s OK. Provided nothing is hidden. Agatha Christie used to use a Dr. Watson-like device for her Poirot novels, but then got rid of it, no doubt when she realized that simply following Poirot in close[-enough] third person was sufficient.
Still, that doesn’t excuse her gross violation of this principle in The ABC Murders, where she expands her omniscience but nonetheless hides crucial elements from the reader merely as a ploy to keep the mystery going.
So I think it’s very important, in head-hopping, to keep the points of view distinct through the use of clearly demarked boundaries—space breaks, chapters, etc.—and also to make sure that each point of view is seen divulging the entirety of its knowledge of the narrative.
[RR: Rather than “head-hopping,” I think of this approach as “point-of-view shifts.” The former involves sudden, unrestricted, unmotivated jumps in the midst of action while the latter uses clearly signaled breaks limited to reasonably long, discreet segments of narrative.]
Nonetheless, I do see many bestselling works of fiction that practice ‘head-hopping’ in continuous action, and no one seems to care. Well, not ‘no one,’ but nearly—I thought I was it until your email came along.
Perhaps in terms of encouraging writers, it’s best to focus on what consistency in use of point of view can deliver, and get away from what it’s meant to avoid. The masterpieces of unreliable narration, from The Aspern Papers to The Remains of the Day—not to mention Ron Howard’s adaptation of A Beautiful Mind—all attest to the power of point of view. In other words, don’t make point of view just a vehicle of narrative, make it a partner, or a driving force, in narrative.
I’ve a client who, when I pointed out how much she hopped from head to head, told me that head-hopping was common in her romance sub-genre. Yet I know an editor with a firm that publishes romance who hates head-hopping—and summarily rejects novels that do it.
A top New York literary agent wrote to say
I am in absolute agreement with you. People do it, but, for the most part, it doesn’t work (I’m not going to say never, because this is fiction we’re talking about, not algebra). “Hopping,” as you’ve put it, distances the reader from the close emotional connection with the central point-of-view character in the scene, it draws attention to the fact that writing is an artifice (destroying the “suspension of disbelief” that reading a novel usually though not always entails), and it generally just plain sounds awkward. Unless it’s masterfully pulled off, it usually signals a lack of control of authorial voice, to my mind.
On the other hand, an editor at a major New York imprint opined,
I am not overly troubled by rotating POV if the writer can sustain the variety of voices and allow the reader to maintain clarity in his/her mind about who is whom. Singular POV is not sacrosanct, in my opinion.
Here, though, because he uses the term “rotating,” I think the editor is actually talking about skillful use of multiple points of view, not bolting from head to head within a scene. By the way, Donald Maass suggests that ending a chapter at a moment of suspense and then shifting to another point of view for the next chapter is a good way to build tension.
As with just about anything in writing long-form fiction, there aren’t really any rules. However, I don’t think there’s an agent or editor who has a problem with a consistent, “non-hoppy” narrative, so why take the chance of (a) running into someone who hates it, and (b) distancing your reader from your characters?
Here’s something on the subject I found on English teacher and author Crawford Kilian’s the Writing Fiction website that describes “episodically limited third-person omniscient POV,” a single close third-person narrator. He also describes using the POV character’s voice as the narrator as I suggest for characterizing each character’s narrative.
Whoever is the point of view for a particular scene determines the persona. An archbishop sees and describes events from his particular point of view, while a pickpocket does so quite differently. So the narrator, in a scene from the archbishop’s point of view, has a persona quite different from that of the pickpocket: a different vocabulary, a different set of values, a different set of priorities. As a general rule, point of view should not change during a scene. [emphasis mine] So if an archbishop is the point of view in a scene involving him and a pickpocket, we shouldn’t suddenly switch to the pickpocket’s point of view until we’ve resolved the scene and moved on to another scene.
Maintaining a consistent point of view within a scene is the best craft, but a novelist can change point of view within scenes if clearly differentiated and integrated. In a fast-action scene involving characters the reader knew well, I used this technique to create a whole with their separate parts (centered dots indicated a POV break):
Marion screamed. The woman turned toward her and shot.
The bullet slammed into Marion’s neck—
• • •Karl watched Marion fall. It seemed like slow motion. This couldn’t be real.
He ran down the aisle toward her.
For what it’s worth
Ray
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