Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Greetings, Storytellers. Diana here today, Stephen Geez has been running a fabulous series on Point of View, looking at our POV choices from different angles. This post is a bit of a spin-off. I’m going to talk about the dreaded POV monster called head-hopping. This is another one of my “learn by failure” posts.

When we write, we strive for stories that will grip our readers. We want an emotional investment, and the best way to do that is to immerse our readers inside our character’s head, heart, and skin, the deeper the better. The reader sees, hears, smells, and experiences what the character does, up close and personal.

When I started writing, I was a point-of-view “head-hopper.” I wanted to share every character’s thoughts and feelings in every scene. My writer’s group rolled their eyes and eventually critiqued it out of me. I learned the hard way –…