Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Head Hopping

Head Hopping

I have not done well the past several days with my blog. It has been extremely hot and we don’t have air conditioning. We have been lethargic and fled in the car to escape the heat.

I have been thinking about the whole idea of head hopping and how thoughts should be reserved to the Central Character (CC). I find this notion acceptable if, as in case 1, there is a clear CC but not so much so as in case 2, when the novel is written in a way that each chapter focuses on a single character. The head hopping rule it would seem to me applies to case 1.

In Game of Thrones each chapter was headed by the Highlighted Character (HC) and the reader had no difficulty dealing with the character’s thoughts. It might have been boring in parts but the reader was not confused by the perspective of who is thinking what. In the fantasy novel I am writing, which uses the George Mason approach, I intend for my HCs to show thoughts. The big advantage is that in character development, the HC's thoughts, contrasted by what they say and how expectations square with reality, speaks volumes about who they are. If you want to get to know a character in a hurry delve into their expectations and then show what actually happens. The difference in the two is illuminating and spikes reader interest.

As a sensual prose writer I have used WDC to perfect my skills in portraying the sexual experience but at the same time learned that often it is best to dispense with the graphinc details. It is the emotional anticipation and the consequences which speak to the experience more than the flesh slapping.... still learning where to venture and how long to stay are a real challenge to writing in this vein which for most writers is unexplored.

Since the book deals with women who conceive children destined for great things, the circumstances surrounding the conceptions should be of interest to the reader. This is not to say that all the intimate details of the act need to be graphically portrayed but rather that what these women were thinking about before, during and after the intimacy are areas worth exploring. Each of the women will bring to the experience a different set of baggage and while all will feel maternal warmth for their embryonic hopes it will not be the same experience for any one of them.

In the case of four of the women, their pregnancies are the result of a blood scarab, a relic that has passed from generation to generation for the past six hundred years. It is more a symbol of who they are and the social backgrounds of where they come from. None of them really expects that after the passage of so long a time that these legacy artifacts are still viable. However, there are other woman in the story who conceive in the traditional manner and in accordance with the prophesy. It is important to the story that each one show what they think about events leading up to, during conception and in the weeks and months that follow. Thus I will be suspending the head hopping rule and hope that in doing so I won’t confuse or outrage too many readers.