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 jail cell. The writing he does can't be erased. I want to keep all his thoughts in. Would it be too much if I kept part of the writing in the journal, but just have it crossed out? What I want to do is keep the mistakes in his writing crossed out but legible so readers can read his real thoughts/things he edits out of his journal. Would this be too much? Would people understand what I'm doing?
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If you try this technique and find that it's clunky or confusing, you might want to frame the whole story with a narrator who is reading over the main character's diary and explaining it for the benefit of an eventual reader, giving context.
This sort of device is often used when the author needs a lot of exposition, but the character would never give it.
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There are two basic applications of this technique: serious and comedic.
In the serious version, your character changes opinion about given passage while writing it. It tells about character development, how their view of things changes through introspection and reminiscence.
My best friends gave their lives for
this countrythe wealth of the oil tycoons.
This technique is also quite successfully used for comedic effect where the character first expresses true thoughts and then replaces them with euphemisms, for example replacing childish glee of enthusiasm with more serious and moderate approach:
"
Yes, yes! I'm yours, let's do it!This idea has some merit and is worthy of further consideration."
Note: strike-through considerably reduces legibility. Don't overuse it. Crossing out single sentences is okay, but if you cross out entire paragraphs, you're abusing it.
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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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