Writing Wednesday: The Thing About Head Hopping

Hey there and happy Wednesday to all! It's been a while since my last writing post - between hosting other authors and a crazy day job and my latest WIP, it seems my blogging time has been limited lately.

But not my reading time.

In my never ending quest to become a better writer, I thought I'd revisit some classic Nora Roberts. Who could be better than the Queen of Romance to show me the perfect turn of phrase or character arc. The Washington Post calls her "The most successful novelist on planet Earth." Except I found something else that early Nora was the queen of.

Head hopping.

I've been reading so much contemporary, contemporary romance that jumping back just a few decades to the mid-1980s seems so... dated. Granted, she still wrote strong heroines, even then. But she liberally hopped around in the heads of minor characters to reveal plot points or opinions that the reader would have no other (easy) way of gathering.

Harlequin Digital has recently re-released a slew of Nora's early works as Kindle books, so the publishing date claims 2017. But when you read the insides, it tells you "originally published in 1986." I was still in college then. Immersed in Shakespeare and T.S.Elliot, Dickens and Hart Crane. As an English major, I didn't have time to read romance when there was so much required reading to digest. And even when I "discovered" the romance genres, I jumped straight to Jennifer Crusie (romance with a little suspense and a side of sass, no head hopping) and Charlaine Harris (paranormal, first person POV).

So I have to ask, when did this expectation from publishers (and readers) change? Are there many older works of romance that jump between POVs and let minor characters get a thought in edgewise? Does that fall into the "omniscient narrator" thing we're warned against in writing classes?

Do you notice it when you're reading? Because authors still do it.

I fully admit, I don't like the head hopping. I recently chastised a fellow YA author in my review of his latest book for including a few instances of jumping into the secondary characters' heads for a sentence or two in order to reveal an important fact to the reader. He followed up with an email to tell me "he didn't have another way to get the information out there." I disagree. It might be harder on the writer to come up with an alternate scenario, or take more words, but that's our job. To create the world we are portraying down to the last detail, so how could anything be "impossible" ??

What's your take? How do you avoid it in your own writing? Do you cringe when you find it in books you're reading, or take it in stride? Have I taken this writing rule too much to heart?

I guess I have more questions than answers when it comes to including multiple POVs in your story, and hoping that someone else can explain it to me.

In the meantime, Happy Writing!

Laundry and POV on a grey day

Cape Cod Weather Today: The sun broke through for a few hours yesterday afternoon, but the fog and clouds are back this morning. I shoulda mowed the lawn yesterday....

I woke up with a quote running through my head.

"A man may work from sun to sun but a woman's work is never done."

Who said that first? Where did it come from? Has it always been like this from the dawn of time?

Laundry is piled in my bathroom and in my garage in front of the washing machine. My daughter carried her laundry basket out of her room yesterday, saying, "Mom. Really. This is out of control."

Should I tell her it's foreshadowing of her life to come?

It's only Wednesday, only the third day of the full summer schedule, and already I'm counting the days until swimming lessons are over. The kids are at sailing in the mornings, and swimming in the afternoons, one child had karate after swimming yesterday, today we have basketball evaluations after swimming for other son... and guitar lessons start up again next week.

It's good that they're all busy. But where does my writing time fit into this whole schedule thing? Where is the mommy time?

And where, for goodness sakes, does laundry fit into this picture?

My Point Of View (POV) is slipping.... narrowing... making it hard to see outside the kids' schedules and to a bigger, more balanced picture. The frenetic pace of summer is swirling me up into it's vortex.... or something like that.

In terms of writing, I took a fresh look at the Mermaid manuscript yesterday. Chris Richman was right in his assessment, and I changed the character ages back down to twelve. I still need to send off a thank you note, since his rejection was more than perfunctory. I still need to go through and look at the different POVs running through it, and whittle them down as per more of his excellent advice.

However, I think I disagree that I can't have any adult POVs. I just finished reading Anthony Horowitz's Raven's Gate, book 1 of the Gatekeepers series. He has several adult POVs sprinkled in. Okay, he's a NYTimes bestselling author and can break any rules he wants. But I feel strongly that I need to keep my bad guy's POV and he's an adult.

I could make his second in command a teen, perhaps, and get rid of the one or two times we're in Gramma's POV. I need to revisit this, and see if I can keep it to the 3 main characters POVs, and move one of the underwater scenes to the palace so we can see it all in Kae's POV. Ooh, good idea. I'll work on that today.

After I finish the laundry. Or at least start.