Or is it really head-hopping if it's third-person omniscient? Like, if two characters are hiding something from the other, so it is not even showing on their faces. "Blah blah blah," he lied, confident that (whatever.) "Blah blah blah," the other said. He didn't feel the need to say (important detail.) Blah blah," the third said, knowing it was just like (that one time.)
I found a pretty simple explanation of the difference here: http://marcykennedy.com/2013/11/head-hopping-can-avoid/ To quote: To be head hopping, a passage needs to meet two criteria: (1) The viewpoint shifts between characters without a proper transition (e.g. a scene break). (2) The thoughts/feelings of the characters are given in their voices rather than in the author’s voice. ... Omniscient POV will be written in the author’s voice. The characters’ feelings and thoughts will be filtered through the author narrator. Head hopping will be in the characters’ voices, and you’ll go back and forth without a proper transition.
What she said... There's no way to head-hop right, like there's no way to do info-dumps the right way. It might help if you read books with omni narrator, especially before you write your own stuff. At least that has helped me to get the hang of it... to some degree... it's still pretty abysmal -- my least favorite POV
Hmmm, that linked to two other articles that are also helpful and I need to study... I think I need to search for truly omniscient. I guess it is a case of God deciding to mind-read only one person at a time? The voice shouldn't be a problem, except that I write everything in medium purple and then adjust dialogue for characters that are either lighter or darker on that spectrum... and the one person who should be unintelligible if I write her accurately. What is a problem is mid-scene lapses in attention. Oh, here we go... http://jamigold.com/2011/02/what-makes-omniscient-pov-different-from-head-hopping/ "In other words, an omniscient POV story would be able to share different characters’ thoughts and feelings, but would not word them in the characters’ voices." So is it bad that most of the characters and my narrator speak in the same voice with little variation?
When characters are actually speaking, their personalities have to show. Dialogue is not the narrator talking.
The narrator never gets angry, wistful, scared, or impatient. The characters do. Some of them are also "use four words where one would do" while I'll try to keep the really floral words contained in the dialogue. For a modern work about a pack of cheerleaders, the narrator might sound like a teenager who has nothing to do with them. Still typical language for a highschooler, but without the sniping and fawning that the cheerleaders might do.
