![]() I could have pulled from Dickens, Hemingway, or many others, but the real master of this form is George Eliot. Let’s look at an example of moving from head to head that works. Especially in any single scene, stick with just one or two, three at most. So how do you avoid the kind of head-hopping that’s the mark of a novice writer, one not yet ready for publication? These two rules of thumb are a start:ġ) If you’re using an omniscient POV, establish it in the first paragraph or two.Ģ) Don’t try to give everyone’s thoughts and feelings. But if you’re writing from an omniscient POV, you may move from one character’s thoughts to another’s. If you’re writing from the first person or third person close POV, the solution is simple: never, ever head-hop. What? The reader is immediately disoriented-I thought we were sticking with Karen? Steve wondered if this meant he’d gotten the job. She looked up at Steve, smiling a bright, false smile. It was all becoming so tedious, and she had paperwork to finish before lunch. Here we are on page four: Karen stifled a yawn as she glanced again at the resume. Imagine that you’ve just started a book in which you’ve followed Karen for two or three pages throughout her busy day at the office and into an interview with a job applicant. It’s also the kind of amateur mistake that will make agents and editors write you off. This is extremely confusing to the reader-it breaks a sort of pact made in the opening pages. That’s when a writer carefully establishes third person close with one character, and then without warning randomly drifts into other people’s heads. You’ve probably heard about the horrors of head-hopping. ![]() The catch is that omniscient POV is tricky to do, and easy to get wrong. What are the odds: other people too have feelings and desires and fears. Many of the greatest novels ever written move in and out of intimacy with more than one character, so much so that that movement becomes almost a moral, mind-opening act. ![]() It’s also much easier to control than omniscient POV.īut omniscient POV offers other readerly (and writerly) pleasures. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that-many, many brilliant books and stories use third person close. You know: like you do in your own head every day. Third person allows the reader to slip into a single consciousness, to identify with just that one, and see the others as threats or objects of desire. People will warn you that omniscient POV is less intimate. The omniscient narrator knows what all the characters see and feel and know, as well as things none of them know, like what’s past and to come. These days, the most common POV in fiction is “third-person close.” That’s where the narration only sees what your main character sees, only knows what she knows, can only speak her feelings.īut an omniscient narrator knows much more than what’s happening in front of and inside the main character. Omniscient point of view-that godlike narrator who knows it all-is out of fashion. But if you do it right, it can crack your writing open in the best way.
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