The main character in my new book is a writer herself, and I want to have a couple segments where the readers get to read part of her stories. But I also don't want her writing to feel too similar to the actual narration of the book, so what do you think if I deliberately made the parts that she writes bad? Not unreadably bad, just...teenager writing self-insert fanfiction kind of bad. For example... A frightening and terrifying shape rose in front of the full moon, its blood red eyes glowing like twin nightmares. Isla stood tall before it, not the least bit intimidated. A snarl carried the scent of rotten breath to her nose. She drew her weapon, curling her lips back in a savage grin as she summoned the mysterious, eons old power of her people. She grinned as her humanity melted away, turning her into— A shrill beeping cut through the early morning silence, jerking Isla back into reality. She lay on her stomach in bed, reading lamp illuminating the notebook she was writing in. Blinking, she rolled over to look at her alarm clock. Six o'clock already?
I did that in one book, where the perpetrator had written a steamy romance, and i made it intentionally bad and full of cliches like omniscient boobage ... it has to be sufficiently different to your normal style that people can see that it's intentionally badly writen
Do you think it is different enough? This is the first draft sp I'm liable to change it, but any pointers I could get to make it work better would be welcome.
I think it is different enough. Speaking as a reader, it doesn't have to be very different from your own style as long as it's clearly marked. I'm thinking of a series of sea novels where a character wrote extensive diary entries; they weren't that different from the overall tone of the book, but it was still clear, partly from the fact that the diary was in 1st person. Maybe consider a change in narrative perspective or something structural like that to distinguish the excerpts from the novel proper.
