What is Head-Hopping – and Why Should I Avoid It?
Head-hopping is something I comment on in nearly every new author’s manuscript – but it’s vital to avoid it in order to build the strongest narrative possible and keep readers connected to your story.
Head-hopping is when we jump from one character’s perspective to another’s without a break in between – we literally hop from being inside one person’s head to another’s.
This causes issues for several reasons:
It pulls the reader out of the narrative, by suddenly switching from one character to another – and the last thing we want to do is disturb the reader when they’re engrossed in our narrative, and give them an opportunity to put the book down.
It prevents readers from getting fully enmeshed in the characters’ internal narrative and story, by jumping about rather than really digging into one character at a time.
It risks breaking the reader’s confidence in the writing, because it allows the narrative to hop between heads in a way that doesn’t show the author has control of what’s happening.
Part of the reason head-hopping is so common is that most authors write in third person, and this can lead to the belief that the narrator is omniscient. Historically, many authors did write like this, and the narrative did indeed jump between different characters’ heads, thoughts and feelings. But there are different kinds of third-person narrative, and nearly all books nowadays are written in third-person intimate (or close third-person), rather than third-person omniscient.
Here’s the difference. In third-person omniscient the narrator is, as the name suggests, all-knowing. They know what every character is doing, wherever they are, and can move between them at will. In third-person intimate, the narrator focuses in on one character at a time (whether that’s one character for the whole book or one character for each chapter), and shows us the story through their eyes. That means we see things as they see them – and thus cannot see anything they can’t. It means we know what they are thinking and how they feel about it – but not what those around them are thinking. It means we can’t jump into another character’s head, or move to another place, or know anything that character doesn’t know, without breaking the implicit rules of our narrative.
Third-person intimate allows us to really experience the story along with the character, and so it’s an incredibly powerful perspective to choose. But it also has boundaries we need to write within. Third-person omniscient gives you more freedom in the sense that you can tell the reader things your character doesn’t know, but because you don’t get right inside the character’s head the narrative can feel distant. We lack the intimacy of third-person intimate narrative – and this is why this type of narrative can feel a little dated nowadays.
How can I tell if I’m writing third-person intimate or not?
An obvious tell that your narrative is third-person narrative is that you share the character’s internal thoughts and feelings – but it can often be much more subtle than that. You might not show their direct thoughts – ‘I hate her, Danny thought’ – but instead show us how they feel or think about things less obviously.
The best way I have heard the distinction between these types of third-person narrative described is that in third-person intimate the narrative is in the voice of the character. Whilst third-person omniscient features an anonymous and all-knowing narrator who tells the story, third-person intimate pulls in the character’s own voice, using the dialect or wording they might favour and allowing their reactions to colour things, so that we learn something about the character from the very way the story is told.
In third-person omniscient, the narrator might say, “She didn’t know where she was”, whereas in third-person intimate it might read, “Where on earth was she?” In the latter, we get a sense of the character’s personality and reaction to her current predicament, not just the fact of her being lost.
If you struggle with head-hopping – or any other element of writing – I can help! You find out more about the editorial support I can offer here, or sign-up to my Substack below for writing and editing tips and advice.
