Free Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence by Lisa Cron

Mattie was in bed, wasn’t she? Kathryn had seen her to bed, had watched her walk down the hall and through a door, the door shutting with a firmness that was just short of a slam, enough to make a statement but not provoke a reprimand. And Jack—where was Jack? She scratched the sides of her head, raking out her sleep-flattened hair. Jack was—where? She tried to remember the schedule: London. Due home around lunchtime. She was certain. Or did she have it wrong and had he forgotten his keys again? 9
     
    Notice how every fact in that attention-grabbing paragraph has meaning that compounds in light of each new detail. In other words, it adds up. What emerges is a candid portrait of Kathryn, her family life, and how she processes information as she struggles to quell the growing suspicion that something is very wrong. It’s not just her thoughts, which are very simple, but her thought pattern—staccato, ragged, confused—that drives the scene forward. The minimal tags Shreve gives us—“She thought in quick succession,” “She tried to remember the schedule”—serve to highlight the thoughts themselves, establishing a style, and a voice, that is fresh, compelling, and hard to resist.
    But is a tag really necessary? Do we need the author to tell us that we’ve slipped out of the narrative voice and into the character’s head? Nope. In this snippet from Elmore Leonard’s
Freaky Deaky
, there is no tag or signifier at all:
    Robin watched him drink his wine and refill the glass. Poor little guy, he needed a mommy. She reached out and touched his arm. “Mark?” Felt his muscle tighten and took that as a good sign. 10
     
    Is there any doubt that it’s Robin, rather than Leonard, who sees Mark as a poor little guy in need of a mommy? Yet there are no quotation marks, no italics, no “she thought,” “wondered,” “realized,” or “mused.” There is nothing at all in the text that flags this as Robin’s opinion. Why? Because none is needed. We get it. Just as we understand that it’s Robin’s
opinion
that Mark’s muscle tightening is a good sign. As far as Leonard is concerned, she could be totally wrong—which is one of the things that keeps us reading. We want to find out.
    Notice that, as when writing in first person, a character in third person can’t make a definitive statement about how anyone else feels or what they’re about to do. Just as in life, characters can only assume. And very often that assumption then tells us something about the character making it, as evinced by Selevan and his self-possessed goth granddaughter, Tammy, again from
Careless in Red
:
    She nodded thoughtfully, and he could tell from the expression on her face that she was about to twist his words and use them against him as she seemed only too expert at doing. 11
     
    George is not telling us that Tammy
is
going to twist Selevan’s words. Rather, it’s
Selevan
who is drawing that inference from her expression. From this we learn three things: that he’s positive it will happen; that it might not; and, most revealing of all, that he feels she misunderstands just about everything he says. So since
Careless in Red
is written in third-person omniscient, if George wanted to make it clear that Tammy has, in fact, not misunderstood Selevan, could she reveal it in the next sentence by taking us into Tammy’s head?
    No, she couldn’t, because that would be committing the sin known as “head hopping.”

Head Hopping
     
    No matter whose point of view you’re writing in, you may be in only one head per scene. Thus, since George began the scene in Selevan’s head, there she must stay. Why? Because switching POV in the middle of a scene is often so jarring it instantly breaks the flow. It looks something like this:
    Ann paced, wondering when Jeff would snap out of it and tell her what happened. Had he finally told his wife Michelle about them? Why did he look so heartbroken? She wanted it to be a good thing, but try as she