It’s head-hopping, not head-hunting

When I was younger, I read a few pages in bed each night before going to sleep. Now I’m asleep within ten minutes of going to bed but, on those rare nights when I’m not, I tell myself a story. A few years ago, I rehearsed the same “bedtime story” over several nights. But, I never got past the opening scene: a farmer named Avri drove his donkey-pulled cart along dark and deserted streets of a medieval city, through the main gate and down a steep mountain. He was going home.

From that scene, I eventually wrote my personally-acclaimed, though not popularly-received, debut novel, When the King is Evil. I wrote in the mornings before going into my office. I wrote on the weekends. It was so fun to see the characters come to life, the story develop. I escaped into the world I created and enjoyed writing about it. 

I was so proud of it when the first ten author’s copies arrived.

That was a few years ago. I didn’t know then what I know now about story-telling.

I made a new friend, Lynette, at a writer’s conference last year. She’s read a synopsis of the book and, though she was “intrigued”, she helped me by explaining I make a newbie mistake: head-hopping. I knew what “head-hopping” was since ACFW members critiqued my first (and my last) submission to them with the same observation. 

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My understanding of “head-hopping” is writing from multiple characters’ points of view (POV) within the same scene. Reading my manuscripts now, I see it. I do that . . . a lot.

I tend, also, to write from an invisible narrator POV.  I know this POV isn’t popular today unless the author writes something akin to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (It’s probably necessary when one writes dialog for hobbits, elves and wizards. And those talking trees, too.)

My invisible narrator POV creates a problem for my readers. 

Because I’m the author of When the King is Evil, I know its plot from beginning to end; I know every character’s thoughts and feelings at each point in the story. But, and here’s the problem, my readers don’t. The invisible narrator’s POV jumbles together with three or four characters’ thoughts and feelings and it gets confusing. Confusion leads to frustration and, still worse, to laying the book aside, unfinished. No author wants that.

The solution to my “head hopping” problem is to write from one character’s POV for a section, a chapter or a scene. Switching to another character’s POV is acceptable as long as there is some kind of obvious break in the story. 

Lynette’s advice is to correct this in the manuscript, perhaps hire an editor, and then re-submit it to her. Since I want a publisher to consider this novel, I’m all in. 

When the King is Evil has 70,000 words. The sequel is 90,000 words.

This is gonna take me a while.