Visualizing P.O.V.: are you head hopping?

I am a multiple award winning author of science fiction, fantasy, and children’s books, stories, and articles. I adore reading science fiction and fantasy. One thing I’ve noticed, particularly in books and stories published in the past fifteen to twenty years is that there is a lot, A LOT, of head hopping in the majority of books within the genre.

Not that this is totally bad because I’ve read a lot and I still understand and enjoy the stories. BUT, does a reader really need to know how a minor character is feeling or what they’re thinking every time they speak? Shouldn’t their words and actions be enough that the reader does not need to get inside their heads?  A thought to consider: how many characters can a reader keep track of? Does the reader have to know or see the point of view of every character in every scene?

This was the situation I was faced with on my first book. I did not know I was head hopping between more than thirteen characters until my editor gently pointed it out after reading the manuscript for the first time. She gave it back to me saying “Your first task is to rewrite every scene from a single point of view and I want you to choose a maximum of five P.O.V. characters to write from.” I was surprised and a bit devastated. The manuscript was over 110,000 words long! It was a daunting exercise. We discussed which characters were of greatest importance and I whittled it down to five. It turned into an interesting exercise and one I ended up enjoying. I also reduced the word count to around 86,000 words, which turned out to be more manageable, too. I could see that the story was tighter, cleaner, and, to my surprise, better. And I also ended up getting to know my main characters better, which made for that better story.

After The Blood was published in 2014, I had to laugh at one of the reviews. A reader stated that they really enjoyed reading it, but they considered the per chapter or scene single point of view as unusual. It was unexpected and very cool. He did not understand “how” I could tell such a good story with only five points of view and there was only one P.O.V. at a time! Evidently they were fans of head hopping and my book was a totally different experience. Now, in 2019, I see that as a huge compliment and I will work hard to maintain this style of writing.

So when I started working on the second book, The Balance, I actually wrote it with only four points of view. The third book, The Blades, coming out later this year (2019), has those same four points of view and the fourth book, The Seventh Stone, still has four points of view with the fourth P.O.V. being a different character (she was introduced in The Balance and became a bit more important in The Blades – so she finally becomes important enough to be a point of view character in #4).

This entire process of learning how to manage multiple points of view without being in everyone’s head, led me to try a visual way to see how balanced my presentation was. This is what I came up with:

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I set up a white board on an easel and then got pads of  3″ x 3″ “sticky” notes in five different colors. I then assigned a specific color to each character – writing the character’s name near the top of each note. Then the time consuming part, I read the draft and for each scene, after verifying that the scene was truly from a single point of view, I added the chapter number and the scene number (some chapters had multiple scenes in the same point of view and I needed to know how many scenes were in each chapter) at the top then wrote a brief summary of the scene with a desired maximum of four sentences. The first note was placed in the upper left hand corner of the white board. The second note/scene was place below that. I worked top to bottom then left to right. Sometimes I was not cryptic enough and I needed more than one note to summarize the scene. These longer notes were tucked beneath the first.

I discovered several things during this process. First, I could SEE if any one point of view was lacking in or was overpowering the story. Second, I could use the summarized scenes as an outline for a story summary if an agent might request one. I knew that if I typed the notes up I could further edit to pick out only the highlights. Third, the colored notes could help me describe a particular character arc. But the best part of it was the visual representation of the points of view.

Throughout the process I did find occasional scenes where I had bounced between two character’s P.O.V. and I was able to efficiently correct those as I went along. Sometimes I decided to change the P.O.V. to get across the action and information differently. I did wait until the draft was complete and I had started my first round of editing. I went through a total of three rounds of self editing before sending it to my editor. She stated that it was markedly better than the first draft she received of the first book with its thirteen points of view. It was easier and faster for her to do her job. She could already focus on the bigger picture of the story instead of worrying about any head hopping on my part. All this meant we ended up with fewer back and forth rounds of editing which led to less money out of my pocket in less time for a better end product.

It turned out to be such a great exercise that I used it with the third book. Again I waited until the first full draft was complete before I set up the white board again. With the third book I was astounded to SEE that I had neglected the antagonist’s point of view which I had opened the book with until nearly the end – the last five chapters his P.O.V. showed up four times. The same week I had finished the P.O.V. and scene layout, my beta reader called me to tell me I was missing some scenes in the middle. She pointed out that she kept wondering what the antagonist was up to and she suggested I add two to four scenes or chapters from his P.O.V.. I did so and the color pattern looked much better and the story was more compelling.

So, my question to you is: Are you head hopping? Are you getting inside every character and seeing the action through their eyes in every chapter? Are you bouncing around so much the reader doesn’t know who the main character/s is/are? I’m not saying this is wrong, many well known authors do it particularly in science fiction and fantasy, but you might want to consider trying a different technique. Here’s how: First, choose a maximum of five points of view. Second, keep each chapter or chapter break in a single P.O.V.. Then step back and study the picture of your book. Why not give color-coded P.O.V. and scene breakouts a try. Some other ways to use this technique include: If you have a single P.O.V. you could do a simpler layout by chapter and scenes within a chapter. And you might try color coding rising and falling action or even the amount of narrative, exposition, and dialogue. Any way you use it, you’ll SEE your book in a whole new way.