: Re: What is "head popping" and why is it bad? Most of my writing experience has been with first person, nonfiction stories. Now I want to try some fiction. I'm working in third person, but I'm

@Kevin153

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Third-person limited narration is telling the story in third person, from one person's point of view.
Omniscient narration is telling the story in third person, from a distanced, neutral point of view.
Note that with third-person limited, you may still write from multiple character's points of view--but not in the same scene.
If you want to tell about the inner thoughts and motivations of multiple characters in the same scene, you can do that. But you will want to distance yourself from the characters and writing in an unbiased, neutral tone.
Pros and cons of each:

A benefit of omniscient narration is access to everything that a single character (or any character) wouldn't have knowledge of, including, as you said, access to multiple character's inner thoughts in one scene.
A benefit (and cost) of third-person limited is a focus on a particular character's perspective: you can (and should) imbibe every detail with their perspective, which allows you to reveal character in other dimensions.
A downside of omniscient is that it can be confusing if you are not careful to
state who is doing or saying what continually.
And finally, another implication of omniscient narration is that it feels more distanced from the characters.

Crime and Punishment is an example of a great work of fiction that is written in omniscient POV and employs frequent head popping. It's a useful technique for the psychological nature of the work. Dostoevsky will simply say things like (not a quote),

John asked Sarah how she could afford such a thing. Sarah thought the question awfully
direct, but remained courteous in her responses.

In some passages, he describes the dialogue instead of actually writing the dialogue with dialogue tags, and in other passages he writes the actual dialogue. I think what helps it to work is that he does not employ head popping during actual dialogue; only when describing dialogue.
Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility is another example I read recently. I would study either of those books to get good examples of how to do omniscient POV well, weigh the pros and cons of each POV for your particular work, and decide appropriately.

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