Head-hopping is shifting between the inner thoughts of different characters inside a single scene, without a line break or chapter break, so the reader loses track of whose head they are in.
Where the term comes from
Head-hopping is craft shorthand from editing advice. In a column on Jane Friedman's site, editor Susan DeFreitas separates it carefully from a story that uses several viewpoints. Head-hopping, she says, is a story that includes multiple points of view within the same scene, without the benefit of a line break or chapter break. She adds that revealing the minds of minor characters is a privilege of the omniscient narrator, but that omniscience is an advanced technique. Her main objection is reader whiplash: when it is unclear whose head we are in, the reader has to stop and reread, which breaks what John Gardner called the vivid and continuous dream of fiction. Britannica describes the limited alternative as a story told from the standpoint of one character, which is the pattern head-hopping breaks.
An example
At a bus shelter, Dae-jung watches rain slide off the roof and wonders whether to mention the missing key. Wilhelmina wishes he would stop humming; she has a train to catch and a sister to avoid. He thought she looked tired. The second sentence jumps into Wilhelmina's private thoughts, and the third jumps back. One repair keeps Dae-jung as the viewpoint: "She kept glancing at the timetable, her jaw tight, the way people look when they want a conversation to be over." Now the reader learns what Dae-jung observes and guesses, and Wilhelmina's secret remains a secret.
Common mistakes
- Confusing it with a book that has several viewpoint characters. Changing viewpoint at a scene or chapter break is a standard choice.
- Hopping in the middle of a paragraph, where the reader has no signal that anything changed.
- Treating a deliberate omniscient narrator as a mistake. A consistent narrating voice that moves between minds on purpose is a different technique.
- Fixing the hop by adding "she seemed to feel" to every line, which keeps the confusion and weakens the prose.
How to check your manuscript
Choose a scene and name its viewpoint character. Read it once and underline every thought, wish, worry and private fact. Mark any that belong to somebody else. For each mark you have three options: cut it, turn it into something the viewpoint character can observe, such as a gesture or a tone of voice, or move it to a scene that belongs to the other character. Start with the scenes that have the most characters present, since crowds are where hops hide. The entries on third-person limited and the omniscient narrator explain the two options a hop is usually drifting between, and the revision guide places this pass within a full read-through.
In Musael, the plan board keeps a point of view on each scene, which gives you the intended viewpoint written beside the scene to check the text against.