Short Skirt, Long Jacket - Cake
I'm reading a book by Nora Roberts right now. Before you confiscate my man card, let me explain. It's one she wrote as J.D. Robb, and takes place in a future similar to the one I set Troubleshooters in. My wife recommended it to me as something I might like, and as I had just finished a wonderful Western (Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, since I know you're curious), I had an opening in my reading schedule.
Honestly, it's not bad. She's an excellent writer. Her characters pop off the page as vibrant and believable. The plot of hunting a serial killer is strong and she executes it well. Even the technology doesn't seem anachronistic, which is important in a near-future story. I'm enjoying reading it.
Except...
...for one thing: her tendency to head-hop in the middle of scenes. If you don't know what head-hopping is, let me explain. Say you have a character that you establish right away as your narrator. She spends a few chapters working on the plot, interacting with other characters, sharing her thoughts with you, the reader, and giving you the chance to get to know her. Then she goes to talk to this one guy and midway through a scene you're reading about HIS thoughts and feelings for a paragraph before going back to hers. For me, that's like hitting a roadblock. I have to stop reading, back up, and reread the section in question again before I realize "Oh, this isn't HER thinking that." Now, I don't know if this is something that's just part of her writing style, or if it's something that fits consistently in her other genre (steamy romance, I'm led to believe).
I hate it.
I firmly believe that a scene should only be told from a single narrative point of view if you're going to be getting inside that narrator's head. That doesn't mean it's wrong when someone else does it; it means I can't stand to read it. I've written books with multiple narrative points of view: Deep Six, Troubleshooters, and my current project Blackout all feature multiple narrators. However ... I make an effort to clearly separate scenes where I have different narrators. I don't switch them mid-scene to avoid the disconcerting head-hopping I don't like to see in other authors' works. Call it a quirk or a foible, but it's my preference.
In unrelated news, my agent submitted Deep Six and Mustang Sally (and, hence, the entire Just Cause Universe series) to Random House. For those of you keeping score, that's three publishing houses (RH, Tor, Baen) with my work floating around somewhere inside them. Here's hoping for an auction!
2 Critics:
It sounds like she's taking an omniscient POV instead of a third-limited one. I agree that reading stories like that is jarring, particularly if it begins out of nowhere. I like having things a little more partitioned.
In spite of all that, I think it says something great about a writer when they can do something like that and you don't mind it. It's just rare when that happens, I think.
Can't wait to hear the good news about the publishers....!!
I can't stand head-hopping either. I have read Nora Robers/JD Robb and have found myself re-reading what I just read because I missed the switch.
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