: Re: Am I making the writing too complex? My story is of a fantasy world where the wars of several species have all been fought, lost, and the protagonist is writing his journal from inside a

@Debbie451

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Gael Baudino sort of did this in her Water! trilogy.

In the three books (O Greenest Branch, The Dove Looked In, Branch and Crown) she kept switching not merely narrator and POV, but the entire narrative style: parts were standard narration, then parts were being told by a marketing guy as he was getting mugged, then parts were a stone-cutting manual which was increasingly crossed out and being used as a religious text. Everything in the "stone-cutting manual" section was legible, since the words were literally crossed out, but it got confusing after more than a few paragraphs. Later in the third book there might have been entire pages struck out.

This was also the technique used by Christopher Tolkien in the "slush books" of his father's trilogy, showing how JRR wrote text and then crossed it out to rewrite it as something else.

As Chris Sunami notes, use strike-out sparingly. Treat it like salt: a little is good, too much is unpalatable.

You could also convey the same idea in other ways: write the text, then in narration say "Dave looked over his words and rolled his eyes. He drew a big X over the entire paragraph, and picked up from when I get out of here."

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