Head-hopping

Head-hopping is an unsignalled switch from one character's interior viewpoint to another's inside a single scene, which breaks the reader's sense of whose story the moment belongs to.

Mara hated how calm he looked. David wondered whether she would cry. Two interiors, two sentences, no break and no warning. The reader has to relocate mid-paragraph, and the scene loses the one thing that made it tense: not knowing what the other person is thinking.

It is worth separating head-hopping from omniscient narration, because they are often confused. An omniscient narrator is a consistent presence with its own voice and its own judgement, who has access to everyone and uses that access deliberately. Head-hopping is an accident — the viewpoint slips because the writer needed a fact only the other character had.

Three fixes, in the order most editors try them. Choose the character with the most to lose in the scene and stay with them. Render the other person's interior as visible behaviour, which is usually more interesting anyway. Or, if both interiors genuinely matter, break to a new scene or chapter and give the second one its own space.