A recent question from a visitor put me in mind of the thing we writers call 'head hopping'. For those who don't know, that's when you write using a third person omnipotent point of view and jump inside the thoughts of one character to another. Hopping from one character's head to another, as it were. I think it's a strength of that point of view approach, since it allows you to get inside the thoughts of lots of characters, and I felt it was appropriate for my recent novel, Eye of the Timegate, because it's very much an ensemble piece, with more than one main character.

The writing books say you shouldn't jump from one character to another within the same chapter, but I do that quite often, usually between two main characters. I don't have a problem with this - as a writer, nor as a reader.

That being said, how do others feel about this? Is this a sign of amateurish writing? Would you be annoyed if you encountered chapters of a novel that featured this kind of head hopping? Would you even notice?

Being aware of all this, and in the spirit of compromise, I've decided to limit my head hopping to only the major characters in my novel (there are six major characters, with what I would call two main characters among them), and to avoid going inside the heads of minor characters. I hope that's good enough for most readers. What do you think?