Oh ye people, last week I was in Devon on a beach. The wind blew, the rain rained, but my four kids \u2013 none of whom had seen the sea before \u2013 were wild with joy. Me too. I can\u2019t say I come back rested, but I come back knackered in a different way. In the world of parenting, that\u2019s a win.<\/p>\n
While I was away, I read a book that\u2019s been on my TBR list awhile: Where the Crawdads Sing<\/em>, by Delia Owen. The book ends up as a well-executed courtroom thriller, but the heart of the book is a coming-of-age story set in the marshlands of North Carolina with, as its heroine, the semi-feral Catherine \u2018Kya\u2019 Clark.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an excellent book, with enough good writing and character depth to give a basically commercial novel some real swagger. But one scene in particular struck me, because it was such a deft example of head-hopping.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll look at that scene in a moment, but first, a quick refresher on the normal guidelines:<\/p>\n In general, the advice given to new writers is to limit yourself to one point of view per scene or, in nearly all cases, one point of view (POV) per chapter<\/strong>. The reason is that passages such as this one feel clashingly awful:<\/p>\n Peter Piper felt his heart racing. He\u2019d never have a better moment than this. He crept towards the dark shelves at the back of the shop. The place smelled of molasses and candied lemon and boiled sugar, all his favourite things. He had just reached the shelf, when –\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Stop, thief,\u2019 roared Old Mother Hubbard. She was so angry, she wanted to take a swing at him. The little villain!<\/em><\/p>\n The problem here is simple.<\/p>\n We start with Peter Piper. We, the reader, are committed to him. We\u2019re with him, creeping through the dark shop, feeling both excitement and fear. If the writing until this point has been decent, we\u2019ll be fully invested in Peter and his delinquent quest.<\/p>\n Only then, without warning, we\u2019re pulled out of the young man\u2019s head and plunged into OM Hubbard\u2019s interior world. She has her emotions too, but how can we commit to her inner landscape, if two seconds before we were fully committed to Peter\u2019s?<\/p>\n The answer is that we can\u2019t. I\u2019ve published maybe one and a half million words of fiction and I should think I\u2019ve broken the \u201c1 point of view \/ 1 chapter\u201d rule maybe on only four or five occasions in all that time.<\/p>\n And yet \u2013 I have broken the rule. And did so consciously. And did so because the story demanded it.<\/strong><\/p>\n The reasoning behind those exceptions is fascinating and somehow uplifting. We\u2019ll get into that in a second, but first of all an example.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Delia Owen breaking the rule and doing so with ease, grace and purpose. I\u2019ve edited the passage somewhat for length. The whole thing runs to about two pages. The text itself is in italics. My comments are square bracketed and in bold.<\/p>\n She [Kya] walked into the trees without looking, and there, leaning against the stump, was the feather boy. She recognized him as Tate, who had shown her the way home through the marsh when she was a little girl. Tate who, for years, she had watched from a distance \u2026 He was calm, smiled wide, his whole face beaming \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n [This passage is all Kya\u2019s POV. We are given a description of her interior knowledge \u2013 matching this young man up with his ten-year-old predecessor. We are given a physical description of Tate entirely from Kya\u2019s eyes.]<\/strong><\/p>\n She halted, shaken by the sudden break in the unwritten rules. That was the fun of it, a game where they didn\u2019t have to talk or even be seen. Heat rose in her face.<\/em><\/p>\n [Still Kya. Their game involved exchanges of gifts at a distance, but it\u2019s Kya\u2019s perspective on that game we\u2019re hearing about, not Tate\u2019s.]<\/strong><\/p>\n Tate couldn\u2019t help staring. She must be thirteen or fourteen, he thought. But even at that age, she had the most striking face he\u2019d ever seen. Her large eyes nearly black, her nose slender over shapely lips, painted her in an exotic light \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n [Bam! We\u2019ve jumped straight into Tate\u2019s head, and now we\u2019re seeing Kya through his eyes, just as we saw him through hers.]<\/strong><\/p>\n Her impulse, as always, was to run. But there was another sensation. A fullness she hadn\u2019t felt for years \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n [Back to Kya. More of her deep inner world. Then there\u2019s a bit of dialogue, and a modest amount of action. She tells him she can\u2019t read. He, without shaming her, explains what was in the notes he\u2019d been leaving. Then \u2026]<\/strong><\/p>\n Kya hung her head and said, \u2018Thank you for the [feathers]; that was mighty fine of you.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n [Neutral. No particular POV. This could be written by a neutral observer simply conveying external data.]<\/strong><\/p>\n Tate noticed that while her face and body showed early inklings and foothills of womanhood, her mannerisms and turns of phrase were somewhat childlike, in contrast to the village girls whose mannerisms \u2013 overdoing their makeup, cussing and smoking \u2013 outranked their foothills.<\/em><\/p>\n [Not a great sentence, I think. The inklings, foothills and outranking end up delivering a rather muddled image. But look: now we\u2019ve got to Tate\u2019s innermost thoughts \u2013 and we\u2019ve got there without any sense of clashing gears or abrupt switching. The scene finishes by switching back to Kya and Tate\u2019s simple, astonishing offer, \u2018You know, I could teach you to read.\u2019]<\/strong><\/p>\n I think there are several \u00a0things to pick out from this.<\/p>\n First, notice that the sequence moves like this:<\/strong><\/p>\n In other words, the passage initially touches each point of view in turn, but quite gently \u2013 noting physical descriptions only, not plunging far into each separate soul.<\/p>\n That first exchange of perspectives is followed by what is effectively a little trial of love (\u2018Do you mind that I\u2019m illiterate?\u2019) and honour (\u2018Not at all.\u2019)<\/p>\n That exchange, and her acknowledgement of it, allows the leap to complete intimacy, and access to Tate\u2019s innermost thoughts. In other words, the passage ends up claiming full access to both inner worlds, and does so in a way that feels beautiful and right, rather than clashing and false.<\/p>\n The tiptoe approach to that full intimacy is a critical part of what makes it all work.<\/p>\n Second, the scene starts and finishes with Kya\u2019s point of view<\/strong>. That matters. I don\u2019t think you can easily enter a scene with person X and leave it with person Y. There are probably exceptions here, but they don\u2019t immediately leap to mind.<\/p>\n Third, these two, Kya and Tate, are going to become lovers<\/strong>. You already know (100 pages into a 370 page book) that this is the critical first scene in a love story.<\/p>\n That\u2019s no coincidence, because if you want biggest single qualification to the \u201c1 point of view \/ 1 chapter\u201d rule it\u2019s simply this: \u201cexcept where the two people are deeply, deeply intimate.\u201d Usually that will be between two lovers, but it could certainly be between a parent and a child. I once head-hopped in a critical scene between two brothers. \u00a0If the intimacy is there, the head-hopping can feel natural<\/p>\n And \u2013 fourth \u2013 you may as well add this qualification too: \u201cand except where the scene involves breaking into a higher level of intimacy than the pair had before.<\/strong>\u201d This scene is a perfect example of it. It\u2019s not that Tate and Kya are intimate. They\u2019re not. In a way, this is their first true meeting. But they are breaking through into a wholly new level of intimacy. (And for Kya, a somewhat dangerous one.)<\/p>\n The dual-perspective trick both generates that sense of intimacy and is the crowning proof of the intimacy achieved. It\u2019s a beautiful thing to feel and even more beautiful to write.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the good news. The bad news is that you won\u2019t write many such scenes. They\u2019re sweet, because they\u2019re rare.<\/p>\n (Incidentally, I bet there are other examples of head-hopping scenes that don\u2019t fit this model, but I couldn\u2019t think of any while writing this. If you have good examples of well-written head-hopping, then do drop me a line and tell me about them.)<\/p>\n Meantime, I\u2019m going to go and shake Old Devonian sand out of my beach shorts and clear the car of broken crab shells. Is it possible I still smell of seaweed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh ye people, last week I was in Devon on a beach. The wind blew, the rain rained, but my four kids \u2013 none of whom had seen the sea before \u2013 were wild with joy. Me too. I can\u2019t say I come back rested, but I come back knackered in a different way. In<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n