From a Certain Point of View

Once upon a time, I read Tom Clancy’s novels. They were brilliant adventure pieces, though Jack Ryan ultimately became a bit of a Mary Sue character. I was young and my imagination locked into The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin (the Cold War still a thing back then.) But as I read more and read widely, I discovered something Clancy did that I absolutely cannot stand.

Tom Clancy head hops like nobody’s business.

This was an early problem for me as a writer. Part of it came from inhaling movies in the 90s, back when an original idea still had cache. But then there were my authorial influences, the biggest of which was Stephen King. While I loathe head hopping, if done right, you either don’t notice it or realize it moves a scene along perfectly. As an editor, I will smack an author’s hand every time they do it. Why? It’s distracting.

To date, only four authors I’ve read pull off the in-scene head hop smoothly: Stephen King, George Pelecanos, SA Cosby, and Frank Herbert. And Herbert should have stopped doing it after The Children of Dune. (Some say he should have stopped writing Dune novels after Children, but I’ll save that discussion for another forum.) Everyone else, cut it out. Now.

Head hopping, if you haven’t picked up on it, is when you write what’s often called “close third person,” sometimes called “partially omniscient,” though I haven’t heard that term since Reagan’s first term. The character in focus is not the narrator, but the author gets into their head. Now, you can have multiple point-of-view characters in a novel, but only one character per scene. Meaning, if Sally is the point-of-view character in a scene, you may get into her head, have interior monologue, have reactions the other characters cannot see, and feel her emotions. But you can’t slip over to Jack’s head during the scene.

“Well, why not?”

Simple. It makes it harder for the reader to keep track. And especially now, in a time when attention spans are miniscule, you risk throwing the reader out of the story when they’re not sure who’s doing or saying what.

I’ve seen on some forums where fledgling authors puzzled why some famous authors have more than one POV per chapter? I scratched my head when I read this and realized they were listening to the flood of podcasts on writing put out by writers who make more money writing about writing and marketing than they do selling their own fiction. (Why I don’t do a writing book of my own.*) Of course, some of it, too, is the trend toward shorter chapters. Most writers I know do multiple scenes per chapter, so the head hopping between scenes is pretty much mandatory.

First person, of course, eliminates this. Second person should be avoided, though Mick Wall, in his Led Zeppelin bio, uses it to great effect. Probably because, while the book was unauthorized, received a lot of input from the various members of Zeppelin and Jason Bonham. Also, that was nonfiction about people Wall knows very well or had extensive contact with their various circles of friends, enemies, and associates.

“But what about omniscient point of view? Isn’t that in everyone’s head?”

You could argue that, but think about the great literature over the last three centuries. Prior to 1749, English had two great novels: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, both written as travelogues and diaries. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, proceeds to break multiple rules on writing we now take for granted (Authorial intrusion, lengthy asides that would make Stephen King blush, telling critics to get stuffed before the end of Chapter 1 and repeating it throughout the book), keeps the one-head-per-scene rule for the most part. In a couple of fight scenes, he head hops, usually when one character lands a blow on another, then we get to feel everything the combatant feels and hear every inappropriate thought. After that?

Well, there’s Dickens, but there’s also Washington Irving and Mark Twain, both of whom are very much “Get to the friggin’ point!” authors. Much of Twain’s fiction is first person, but most of his third person keeps to one head per scene, particularly later on, like his last novel published in his lifetime, A Horse’s Tale. Before Fielding and his two diarist colleagues? Shakespeare and Milton. One wrote plays (by nature, dramatic until you hit a soliloquy), the other epic poems. (Imagine if Milton teamed up with Pratchett. Hoo boy!) But while other writers (Looking at you, Dickens and Hawthorne!) head hopped in their novels, one head per scene, if not the entire book, had already become the rule before Jefferson crammed on the Declaration of Independence the night before it was read.

“But, gee, TS, I want to show what the other character’s thinking, too.”

Ah, easy enough. Have the character react. Show, don’t tell. (My least favorite writing rule, but it’s hammered into writers for a reason.) If an innocent remark by Mark makes Cindy angry, you don’t need to get into Mark’s head. Have him act hurt when she voices anger and let Cindy interpret it. Or…

Scene break and jump into Mark’s head. Elmore Leonard sometimes wrote entire chapters of very short scenes ping-ponging between POV characters.

Remember, it’s all about the reader. And if you catch yourself doing it in the first draft, remember, that’s what revisions and rewrites are for. And your editor. I’m here to help.

*I edit. Therefore, I blog about it.