Lock in to point-of-view (and eliminate head-hopping for good)

Writers tell ourselves lots of lies.

• “I’m not a real writer.” (Whew, that’s a big one.)

• “If I just put my book out there, people will find it.” (Extremely damaging.)

• “I manage point of view intuitively. I never have to think about it.”

That last one is what we’re talking about today.

“You know,” I say, “I’m a pretty solid POV writer. I’m a professional editor, after all. I know what I’m doing. I stay locked into my POV. One head per scene.” Then I start writing and by page three I’ve been inside four different skulls like some kind of literary revenant.

We’re not doing it on purpose. That’s what makes it so sneaky.

You’re writing along in close third, locked into your protagonist’s experience. Then you need the reader to know something your protagonist doesn’t know. So, without thinking, you slip into another character’s head for just one sentence. Then you slip back.

Congratulations. You just head-hopped. And your reader felt it. They probably didn’t say, “Aha! Gotcha! A POV violation!” Instead, they might have said:

• “Something’s off.”

• “Wait—what?” (they go back and read the passage again)

• “Hold up, who’s thinking this?”

And then, the worst-case scenario—they put your book down.

The most important sentence in this (or any) book about point of view.

Point of view isn’t about who’s speaking. It’s about who’s knowing.

You can write a whole novel in first person and still violate POV if your narrator knows something they couldn’t possibly know. You can write in omniscient third and still fail if you head-hop without purpose.

That’s why I made The POV Lock.

What’s in this deep dive.

This is a 35-page mini-workbook that does one thing and does it thoroughly: It teaches you to lock into your chosen point of view and never accidentally leave.

Inside you’ll find:

• The POV spectrum. From deep immersion inside a single character’s skull to a godlike camera floating above the entire world—and where your story should land on that spectrum.

• First, second, and third person. What each does well, what each is terrible at, and when you should (and shouldn’t) use them. (Pro tip: Second-person POV, not even once.)

• Narrative distance. How to intentionally move closer to or farther from a character’s internal experience.

• Head-hopping audit. A concrete tool to find every place you drifted into the wrong skull.

• The POV diagnostic. Ten questions that tell you which POV is right for your novel (not just the one you always use or that your genre favors).

• The information gap worksheet. For when your protagonist doesn’t know something the reader needs to know. Three legitimate ways to solve it. None of them involve head-hopping.

• Three case studies of masters at work: Six of Crows (rotating close third), Dolores Claiborne (unreliable first person), and The Hobbit (omniscient with a personality).

Plus a working POV checklist you can run on every scene, and the two-sentence test that instantly reveals whether you’ve drifted.

A quick example of what I mean

Here’s head-hopping in the wild:

Sarah watched him cross the room. He looked tired. But really, he was furious. He couldn’t believe she’d said that. Sarah wondered if she’d gone too far.

Four sentences. Four perspective jumps. The reader has no anchor.

Here’s the same moment locked to Sarah:

Sarah watched him cross the room. He looked tired, but the tense muscle in his jaw said otherwise. She’d seen that tightness before. Had she gone too far?

Same information. Same scene. One head. The reader knows exactly whose story they’re in.

That’s what The POV Lock teaches you to do. On every page. Without thinking about it.

Case study: Six of Crows (no, really, pay attention).

Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows is a masterclass in close third person with rotating narrators. The book has six point-of-view characters. It never gets confusing.

Here’s how she does it:

• Each POV character gets a named chapter heading. The reader knows immediately whose head they’re entering.

• Within that chapter, the POV lock is absolute. No head-hopping. No accidental drifts. Even when two POV characters are in the same room, the reader sees the other character from the outside.

• Each character has a distinct interiority. Kaz thinks in strategy. Inej thinks in balance and blades. Jesper thinks in impulses. You could cover the chapter heading and still know whose head you’re in.

The workbook breaks down exactly how Bardugo pulls this off—and how you can steal every single trick for your own rotating-POV novel.

(And a warning from the workbook: multiple POVs won’t fix a boring protagonist. If your reader dreads leaving Character A to enter Character B’s head, more POVs isn’t the answer. Rewriting Character B is.)

Who this is for (and who it isn’t for).

This is for you if:

• You’ve gotten feedback like “I wasn’t sure who was telling the story” or “I got confused about whose head I was in.”

• You know you head-hop sometimes but can’t always spot it in your own work.

• You’re about to start a new novel and want to choose your POV deliberately, not by habit.

• You’ve written a draft and need to revise it with a locked-in POV.

• You want to use rotating narrators (like Six of Crows) without confusing your readers.

This might not be for you if:

• You already have a rock-solid POV lock and have never had a beta reader question it.

• You write exclusively in omniscient POV with a strong narrative voice (and it’s working).

• You don’t want to think technically about point of view.

And that’s fine. Not every tool is for every writer.

But if you’ve ever heard that  your POV drifted and you didn’t know how to fix it—or worse, you didn’t even see it—I made this for you.

The camera lens.

Your story is a room. Your reader is standing in the doorway. Point of view is the camera you hand them.

If you keep jerking the camera around—pointing it toward one corner, then another, then another—the reader gets disoriented. Their photos don’t show them a coherent picture.

They give up and leave the room.

If you hand them a steady focus and say, “stay with this character, watch what they watch,” they can explore the whole room through that character’s eyes. They feel oriented. They understand the contract between author and reader. They keep reading.

The POV Lock teaches you to hold the camera steady.

One more thing (and why I’m telling you this).

The POV Lock is a mini-workbook. It complements my full system, The Editor’s Pass, which launches May 25.

If you buy this deep dive and later decide you want to upgrade to the complete system, I’ll discount the full price by exactly what you paid for this one. There’s a coupon code on the last page of the workbook.

Not because I’m generous (well, maybe a little). But because I think it’s fair. I don’t want you to feel like you wasted money if you upgrade. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

You can print this PDF once, twice, as many times as you need. You can use it with every manuscript, every revision. Mark it up all you want. You never have to buy it again.

The only question that matters.

I’m not asking you to buy anything. I’m asking you one question:

If you could lock into one character’s head and never accidentally leave—would that make your manuscript better?

If the answer is yes, you know where to find me.

If the answer is no, that’s okay too. But watch this space. Because I build tools for the problems you do have.

—Catherine

P.S. I think the Six of Crows case study alone is worth the price of entry. Bardugo rotates through six narrators and it never gets confusing. The workbook shows you exactly how she does it—and how you can too. But don’t take my word for it. Go read Six of Crows if you haven’t. Get the primary source. It’s one of my favorite books.