Be clear about your Point of View (POV). Ask yourself in each scene, who is experiencing this?
To avoid these point of view errors, follow one guideline: You are the viewpoint character. I know this sounds simple, but if you embrace this and execute it, you won’t have any point-of-view errors in your book.
Everything seen, heard, tasted, thought and felt is done by this character. If you attribute any of these things to other people in the scene, you are head-hopping.
Everything seen, imagined, questioned or noticed is by you. For instance, from this point of view, you can’t write:
“Audrey thought he slammed the door.”
You can write:
“Audrey told me he slammed the door.”
POV errors happen any time we’re in a limited point of view. Where we’re supposed to stay inside one viewpoint character at a time—and we write something that our viewpoint character couldn’t know or wouldn’t be thinking about.
The main reason you don’t want to head-hop is that it confuses the reader. Head hopping damages your story by making the writing feel choppy. It makes it harder for the reader to identify with and care about what’s happening to a key character, and if they don’t care, they won’t continue to read.
Readers need to connect emotionally with the characters.
When readers need to pause, even slightly, to figure out who they’re supposed to identify with—they’re left disconnected from the story. Even if they don’t know what to call head-hopping, they’ll know something is off and that they have a difficult time connecting emotionally with the characters.
If you want to switch viewpoints in your story—a proper transition is essential. The best way to do it without jarring the reader is to switch during a chapter break. This is the easiest for the reader to handle because they have to slightly reorient themselves between chapters anyway. It doesn’t seem jarring to be in a new point of view when a new chapter starts.
Another way to switch viewpoints without having to wait for a chapter break is to create a scene break within a chapter. Mark your scene break with asterisks or another symbol. Make sure your scenes are long enough and you don’t end up switching viewpoint characters every scene. It’s important to let the reader settle in and get comfortable in your world.
If you need to switch viewpoints within a scene: insert a blank line. It’s an indicator to the reader to expect a switch. Do this sparingly, it can feel like the scene has stopped dead in order for us to swap viewpoint characters. (You can use asterisks or some other symbol to signify these switches as well, since they’re easier to spot than a blank line. That’s fine too, and actually my personal preference. When in doubt, err on the side of clarity.)
Head hopping is not the only POV error. Plenty of other point-of-view errors are more common than head hopping. These errors are actually more common than head-hopping, especially once a writer passes from new to intermediate.
You Know What They Know
If they don’t know it, we can’t write about it. This is foundational. We can only write what our viewpoint character knows. No “little did she know” or any similar statements blatantly forecasting or foretelling the future.
Our viewpoint character can’t know what’s coming in the future unless she’s a prophet having a vision. No telling what other characters are thinking or feeling (unless, of course, our character has ESP). We also can’t tell the reader why another character did something.
The internal motivation of other characters is unknown to our viewpoint character.
You Sense What They Sense
If they can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, neither can we. For example, if Audrey is our viewpoint character, writing, “Audrey’s face turned red” is a POV mistake.
You can’t see your own face.
What we could write instead is “Audrey’s face burned” or “Heat rushed up Audrey’s neck.” This also means we experience events at the same time our viewpoint character experiences them.
When you describe another character’s voice before they speak, that’s a POV error because your character hasn’t heard the tone they’re going to speak in yet. I’ll give you an example. We’re still in Audrey’s viewpoint for this one.
His voice turned gravelly.
How did you know that? If we’re in Audrey’s head, there’s no way she could know his voice turned gravelly before he speaks in a gravelly voice.
You Think What They Think
Our viewpoint character won’t think about something that they’ve regularly seen or experienced because their mind already skims over it. They have no need to explain or mull over items they interact with on a regular basis because they know how those items work and what they look like.
They can use them without thinking about it. Do you regularly think about the color of your eyes? You probably don’t think about your hair or eye color much at all, or the type of house you live in (unless you come home to find that your husband and his friends have knocked out a wall), or about the way your boss regularly dresses.
You don’t think about how to use a telephone or turn on your computer. You don’t think about the set-up of your society either—you take that for granted. I commonly see this problem come up when a writer either describes what their viewpoint character is wearing long after they’ve put those clothes on or describes their attire at another time when they wouldn’t be thinking about their clothes.
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