Head Hopping: What It Really is & Why You Should Avoid It
HIT PLAY OR READ THE POST BELOW:
It's long overdue that I talk about one of the most controversial topics among the writing community: head hopping. But what is head hopping? How does it differ from omniscient narration? And why is it always considered a bad thing to head hop?
Today I'm going to address all of those questions and reveal my perspective on head hopping as a professional book editor. Over my career, I've worked with hundreds of authors, ranging from debut novelists to best-selling authors, and head hopping is one of the most common issues I see.
What Is Head Hopping in Writing?
First, let's talk definitions. What is head hopping in fiction? In short, head hopping occurs when we occupy the interiorities or the headspaces of multiple characters within the same scene. Typically, we're moving between them seemingly at random; there's no real pattern to when we are switching between perspectives. In one moment, we are in Jill's head, and then the next moment we're in Jack’s, and then we might be in Miles’s head, and then maybe we're back to Jill, back to Jack… we're hopping around.
Many authors have the misunderstanding that they are writing omniscient narration, but they are actually head hopping instead. I often see authors cite very well-known classic novels — best-selling novels from years past — that were written in a style where we do bop around between different characters’ heads. They say, “Well, they're head hopping, so why can't I head hop?” But really, that's not the case — these classic authors are typically writing in omniscient narration.
Head Hopping vs. Omniscient Narration
With omniscient narration, the narrator is actually a character who has their own voice and commentary on the story. While they do have access to multiple characters’ interiorities, we are aware of the narrator's distinct voice and their presence throughout the entire story. So, it is very clear to the reader that we are experiencing the story from their bird's eye perspective, whereas with head hopping, we don't have that narrator presence; we're really just bopping around from character to character's head. It’s often operating like a messy conglomeration of rotating close third person perspective.
Another way to easily tell between omniscient narration and head hopping is if the narrator has access to information that none of the characters know. If that is the case, the narrator is providing their own perspective and commentary and acting in an omniscient way. In the case of head hopping, we are still limited to the perspectives that you are showing at any given moment, and there is nobody to pull us out of what is going on in the characters’ heads and show us something that the characters themselves are not aware of.
It's quite easy to tell in a work of fiction if it is written from an omniscient perspective or if it's head hopping, because an omniscient narration will feel very intentionally crafted, whereas head hopping will feel a bit chaotic and haphazard.
This is best illustrated with an example, so I've put together a passage that head hops:
As Amy tucked Braden into bed, the doorbell rang. She checked the clock on his nightstand: 11 p.m. She had no idea who would come over at this hour. Her heart rate began to pick up. It can't be the police — can it?
“I'll go see who that is, honey,” Amy said, trying to contain the quiver in her voice.
“Okay, Mom,” Braden replied. He knew who was at the door. His father had told him earlier that day that he'd come over sometime that night to pick up his suit.
As Amy approached the door, she considered grabbing the baseball bat she kept in the coat closet.
So, in this example, we begin the first paragraph deeply in Amy's POV. I say deeply because we even get a line of her exact dialogue that goes through her head when she says, “It can't be the police — can it?” This gives us the perspective that this entire scene is going to be told from Amy's perspective. But then, in the third paragraph, we switch to Braden's POV with the line, “He knew who was at the door.” That is information that Amy is not privy to, so we are now dipping into Braden's head. And then we hop back out of it when we jump back to Amy approaching the door and wondering if she should grab the baseball bat.
In this example, there is no sense of an omniscient narrator who is providing commentary or who has access to information that Amy or Braden don't, so it's not operating as omniscient narration. This would be head hopping.
3 Reasons to Avoid Head Hopping in Your Novel
Now that we know what head hopping is, I want to talk about the reasons that it should be avoided:
1. It Prevents Deep Character Connections
When considering what POVs you are going to include in your story, the question really boils down to: who does the story belong to? The POV ultimately is what determines which characters the reader is going to be invested in because we're naturally going to feel most closely connected to your POV characters.
The issue with head hopping is that you are often scattering the story across many perspectives. I've edited novels where we have eleven or twelve different POVs in one single story, and typically in those cases, we're never spending enough time with certain POVs to fully get invested in them. Thereby, you are preventing us from having deep character connections with each of them.
On the flip side, a novel that rotates between three or four POVs on a consistent basis is likely going to feel much more engaging than one that hops between a dozen perspectives because we're going to feel so much more immersed and invested in those characters that the story truly belongs to. So, when I'm working with clients who are head hopping in their current draft, I often will recommend that they reconceptualize the POV as a rotating close third-person perspective rather than omniscient or head hopping. In these cases, I will encourage them to choose maybe three to five distinct POVs that the entire novel will be contained to. That way we will see the story from multiple different angles, but at the same time, we'll still spend enough time with each POV character to develop that character's full arc and to make the reader feel totally engaged with them.
For example, a novel that balances a high number of POVs really well is The Guest List by Lucy Foley. We rotate between five different character POVs, but it never veers into head hopping territory because it is very clear when we are in each POV, and we feel deeply connected to each of those five characters.
2. It Disrupts the Narrative Flow
With head hopping, such as in the example that I just showed, just as we're getting immersed in one character's POV and we're fully inhabiting their experience, we suddenly and abruptly switch to a different character.
This disrupts the flow of the scene and makes it much more difficult for you as the author to execute a smooth crescendo of suspense. It also eventually becomes impossible for the reader to predict whose POV we will be following at any given moment because the narrative is throwing different POVs at us constantly. Oftentimes, this leads to narrative imbalance, in which we end up spending disproportionate amounts of time with certain POVs over others. Maybe we only see one character's POV for a couple lines or one scene, and then that is going to feel like an outlier because we never return to that POV.
I'm not saying it's impossible for you to have a scene or a chapter where you include a POV that you don't include elsewhere — that is especially popular for prologues or epilogues — but if you're just throwing a POV in there in the middle of the story and we never pick it back up, that could be confusing to the reader.
Overall, head hopping just tends to feel a bit chaotic and messy because there's no rhyme or reason to when we are moving between POVs. Typically, the POV switches do not happen at chapter breaks or scene breaks; they happen mid-scene or mid-chapter.
3. It Erodes Your Reader’s Trust
This is arguably the most important reason why head hopping is not typically advised: if the reader has no sense of who the story truly belongs to and is confused by being jostled around between all these POVs at random, eventually they could lose their trust in your authority as a storyteller.
Remember that your goal as the author is to deliver a smooth, effortless, engaging, exciting reading experience where the reader just can't help but turn the pages compulsively. That feeling is unlike anything else. That's what you're trying to achieve. But head hopping makes it very difficult to get there because the reader never feels secure or grounded or fully oriented in the narrative. It's going to be much more difficult for us to get immersed in the novel's world.
Now, head hopping is one of the most common amateur writing mistakes, so do not feel bad if you notice this in your story. It is absolutely something that you can change and fix. It's something I've worked with many authors on.
When you look at the majority of novels that are published by Big Five publishing houses today, they typically will either be in first person, in close third person or in rotating close third person, where we are limited to a set number of POVs and we switch between them very consistently. So, if you're unsure what POV to use for your novel, I would default to one of those and ensure that you're not head hopping.
I hope this helped you understand what head hopping really is and how it can weaken your story. Thanks so much for reading and happy writing!