Head Hopping and other p.o.v. sins

By Betty Vos

(freelance editor and published author under two pen names)

        I'll open with a confession: I've head-hopped with the best of them! When I first started writing romance, I merely strove to get the story on the page, and if I wanted to show a character's reaction to something someone else did or said, I wrote what that character thought or felt about it. No matter that the character might be someone's grandmother's second cousin who was never going to show up on another page—I had no clue. Probably not unrelated to this factoid, it took me quite some time to make a first sale!

             So the first rule of Head Hop Prevention is: limit the number of characters whose heads you ask your readers to spend time in, and select them carefully. Often a grand total of two characters will suffice: the hero and the heroine. There are even well crafted romance novels told in only a single point of view, though that's usually harder to pull off with finesse.

            Sometimes in romantic suspense it can be powerful to add the villain's p.o.v. Sometimes in any romance genre there are other secondary characters with large roles and useful perspectives, and it's worth letting the reader in on that information through those characters points of view. But the small stage gets cluttered quickly, and our readers will lose interest if they constantly have to backtrack to figure out who is thinking what, and why they should care.

            I should probably stop and define head hopping: technically, it's simply switching back and forth between points of view too quickly or too suddenly. How quick is too quick? Ah, there's the rub. Some romance authors prefer to spend an entire chapter in a single character's point of view; this is how Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer put together their first joint effort, Don't Look Down.

            A general rule of thumb in current romantic fiction is that a single scene should contain only a single point of view. It's easy to find published romance by famous best selling authors that violates this rule; it's probably not as easy to find a first sale from a major NY print publisher with flagrant violations, which means the rule is more important for beginners than for established best sellers. That's life.

            What constitutes a scene? Usually a scene is a particular place and time, say just after supper in the living room; and then when the characters move (as they so often do in romance) from the living room to the bedroom, or when they wake up the next morning, that's another scene. There are some excerptions, which I'll turn to in a minute.

            Why should we stay in a single character's head through entire scenes? Romance has a different trajectory than many other forms of fiction: it is focused on the relationship between the characters we've sent tumbling down the rocky path toward their Happily Ever After. Largely for this reason, romance makes far less use of the omniscient point of view than other genres might.

            We want our readers to do more than simply place themselves in our carefully described scene. Staying in one character's head through the length of a scene helps our readers develop their own relationship with our hero and heroine. If we've mastered this technique, our readers start to care, to understand what drives each character, to believe in their dreams and to wonder how in the world they're going to get out of the mess they're making.

            Whose point of view should we offer for each scene? How do we decide? A useful guideline is to tell the scene in the p.o.v. of the character who has the most at stake, the most to lose. There can be other reasons behind p.o.v. selection: perhaps there's information we want the reader to learn that only one character has access to, so we're stuck in that p.o.v for those particulars. Perhaps it's time to describe what someone looks like, or to bring a character to a new place never before seen and show it through that person's eyes. Perhaps we simply need to shift p.o.v. to keep a balance between our two major characters.

            Sometimes, the interaction in a scene dramatically changes the who has the most to lose equation. That's often the ideal moment to shift point of view, whether or not the characters move to another physical space or time. If his confession just hit her in the solar plexus, and we've kept our reader immersed in his agony over what he most fears revealing, the moment of impact may be the perfect time to switch to her head, or even to her solar plexus.

            Some editors will insert a scene break at such a point, thereby defining scene not only by time and space but also by p.o.v.  Others simply let the scene flow on, so that one long interaction in a single physical space is told serially from two points of view. In either case, our readers are likely to come along with us smoothly because they, too, felt the blow when it hit her and are dying to know what she's experiencing.

            Now that we've decided whose head to be in and how long to stay there, it's time to look more deeply into what can be included in a single character's p.o.v. and what must usually be excluded. Actually, this is one of my favorite elements of the writing process: I get to imagine myself inhabiting the body of my character (and don't we hope our readers do this, too?). In addition to a character's thoughts, beliefs and feelings, the material that can be included in a character's p.o.v. consists of only those things that character would know (the past), and what that character can see, feel, taste, touch, smell and hear in the physical time and space where we've placed him or her (the present). Of course in paranormal romance, characters can know all sorts of things through other senses we usually only dream of. World builders in fantasy and paranormal genres must define who can know what when and how, so that readers can stay with the character.

            Here are some simple examples of what a character cannot know: If she has her back turned to him, he cannot know that her eyes just flew wide open (and some editors object to flying eyes entirely). He might surmise that her eyes have opened, or wonder, or hope, or fear, but he didn't see them, and won't, until she turns around. Similarly, if after she faces him she's carefully studying her hands in deep embarrassment, she probably cannot see the tiny hint of a smile that's snaking its way across one side of his face, unless we have her sneak a peek at him.

            Can we share just anything a given character knows or can see? Well, not exactly. In general, it's wise to stick to what that character might actually be thinking about. Most of us know the color of our own hair, eyes, skin, or the delicate lace just barely showing at the bottom of our scooped neckline (you can tell I'm presuming a feminine writer/reader here). But do we walk down the street thinking about those things? I once wrote the following sentence: Elvira (not her real name) felt the bite of the chilly March wind, shook her blond curls and pulled her faded denim jean jacket tighter around her tiny frame. The problem is that there's no reason for her to be thinking about any of those descriptors in that moment. She's feeling cold, and she pulls her jacket tighter, and maybe she shakes her head against the chill, but she's not thinking I'd better shake my blond curls.

            The upshot is that most of the time, if we want to describe a character's face, or clothes, or expression, or hair color, we need to do that in the p.o.v. of some other character—moreover, of some character who would be thinking about it, to whom it does matter. The simplest solution to the problem of describing Elvira's appearance in the above scene is to have the hero watching her, and to show what he would notice, a device that also permits us to include his reaction to what he sees.

            If we want to be stubborn and insist on conveying appearance through a character's own p.o.v., we'd better give the character a reason to be thinking about it. Perhaps she's scrutinizing her appearance in the mirror, or maybe she's doing a mental inventory of what she hopes he’ll notice first when he steps into the room and spies her. Maybe she's just plain vain and is always thinking about what she looks like, in which case we want to be sure we've given our readers a good reason to care deeply about such a vain heroine.

            So if we wanted to, we could say Elvira walked away from him with carefully measured steps. When the chill March wind whipped at her, she pulled her jacket close around herself and shook her head, hoping he'd notice her jaunty blond curls instead of how faded and worn the blue denim looked. If we had a good reason, that is.

            To summarize the threads in this p.o.v. tapestry: fewer heads is usually better than many; readers like to get to know a character for a while before having to shift into another head and body; staying in a single p.o.v. for the length of a scene is a good rule of thumb; individual characters can only share what they think, know and perceive; and characters don’t share everything they know, unless they have a good reason to be thinking about it.

            Originally an academic writer and editor, I learned about p.o.v. through trial and error, fabulous feedback from critique partners, lots of reading, and countless workshops and classes. Now as a free lance editor for both print and e-pubbed romance, I keep a list of useful web-based resources on the pragmatics of writing romance. Here are my favorites for p.o.v. issues:

http://www.fictionfactor.com/guests/pov.html

http://www.floggingthequill.com/flogging_the_quill/2004/12/an_executive_ed.html

http://www.susanvaughan.com/POV.html

Betty's Homepage: http://bvos98.googlepages.com/home

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