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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16334
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16334
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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_."

Original score: 2