Head-hopping

Head-hopping is a point-of-view error in which the narration slips between different characters' inner thoughts and perceptions within a single scene, without a clear transition. One paragraph renders the heroine's private anxiety; the next reports what the man across the table secretly thinks of her. The reader loses track of whose head they are in.

It is not the same as omniscient point of view. An omniscient narrator is a consistent, established voice that stands above all the characters and may report anyone's thoughts — the reader is anchored to the narrator. Head-hopping happens in limited third person, where the reader has been anchored to one character and is then yanked into another without warning.

To spot it, take any scene and ask of each sentence: could the viewpoint character know this? If a line reports another character's unspoken thought, an emotion the viewpoint character could not observe, or a detail happening behind their back, the narration has hopped. The standard fixes are to cut the stray interiority, convert it to observable behavior, or move the switch to a scene break.