: Re: How much indirection is too much? I'm writing a chapter with a lot of indirection, and I'm wondering if I'm doing too much of it. To be specific, it is the main character remembering an event

@Kristi637

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I think the "smell" is when there are too many moving parts in an individual info-drop. For example, consider the following quotes:

(1) When John was young, a merchant told him stories of a tribe who did cruel things to people. He had heard the stories from a group of sailors returning to port from Antarctica.

versus:

(2) When John was young, a merchant told him stories he had heard from a group of sailors of a tribe in Antarctica who did cruel things to people.

Actual sentence structure aside, compare the two. The first quote contains almost the same words, just dropping one level of indirection per sentence. The second quote contains all of the information in one sentence, and is much more unwieldy to a reader trying to wrap their mind around the levels. Ultimately, I think it boils down to being able to contextualize the levels in a meaningful way (like Amadeus has suggested in their answer), but the pacing is as critical as the content in cases where the layers are many and/or complex.

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