How to fix head-hopping in your fiction manuscript

What is head-hopping?

Head-hopping is when your narration in a particular scene bounces between several character’s points of view without a scene break of some kind.  It’s like the narrator is hopping from head to head to head.  Hence, the name “head-hopping.”

Maria was thinking Bob looked hot today with his bowtie.  She loved it when guys wore bowties.  Bob, however, was hating life and Maria too, for that matter.  Joe just wanted to go swimming.

That’s head-hopping.  You get Maria’s thoughts, then Bob’s, then Joe’s, when you need to stick with just one point of view.

Head-hopping is easy to do when you’re learning to write fiction.  I’m finding that I did it a fair amount in the early parts of my first novel before I learned that wasn’t good.

Head-hopping is generally frowned upon these days and seen as a lack of control of one’s craft. 

  

Now, how do you fix it if you discover you’ve got a head-hopping problem?

There are two ways to do this, I’ve found out.

If you have an extended scene, there may be parts where you’ll want to change points of view because one character’s POV is more interesting/painful/dramatic and you want readers to get the story from that angle.  Try to keep the lens of narration coming from the person who has the most to lose or who is in the most pain.  As the focus of interest changes, do a scene break and take a new character POV.

What if you find your head-hopping scene is short?  How do you fix it? 

It may help to highlight in different colors the different POVs.  Color all Maria’s internal dialogue and opinions with red.  Color Bob’s POV in blue.  Color Joe’s in green.  Then print out the scene so you can see it all in front of you.  The color makes the unique POV of Maria, Bob, and Joe stick out so you can see how much of it is there.  It makes it easy to decide how important to the scene that character’s internal dialogue is. The character with the most important internal dialogue is probably the POV you should retain for that scene.  Everything else you can edit out or find a way for your favorite parts to be conveyed in other ways.  (Or if you have to, you can do the scene over again from the other characters’ perspectives.)

When and how making a story timeline helps

As I’ve been working on my novel, I’ve been writing my scenes non-linearly, working on what I find interesting rather than going in a straight line from past into the future.   With a first novel, I figure that any measures I take to keep me writing rather than quitting are allowed. 

Of course, the result of this was that I wrote a lot of scenes with one side of the love triangle, which left the other side of the love triangle rather undeveloped.  I was then left with the problem of trying to figure out where I could insert scenes with the second love-interest.

This is when it became important to me to make a timeline of events in my story.  Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, etc.  

In my timeline, first I put in what I’d already written according to the time cues that I’d already written.  (Time cues are like “two hours later” or “two days later.”) 

When I looked at that list of days and events, I realized I could compact my story and make it happen faster, so I adjusted my timeline and started adjusting my story. 

(Adjusting the time cues in my story took less time using the program Scrivener than it would have taken if I’d written in Word because in Scrivener you can easily jump to any point in your story without having to search for it.  Fabulous time-saver!)

With a timeline, I could tell where interactions between the overwritten love interest happened, and therefore see where interactions between the underwritten love interest needed to be.

I don’t know if I could have planned my novel on a timeline at the beginning because I was still fuzzy on my plot.  It was only when I had written a pretty decent amount—like 70,000 words-- that it became necessary to be so clear about when things were happening.