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Question about a certain writing technique


danex

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I need help identifying a writing...thing. What is it called when a writer does that thing where they have the story being relayed from the main character to the side character, and then the side character becomes apart of the actual story? It's a really awesome writing device and I can't remember if there is a name for it or not. 

I'll describe it some more. Here's an example:
Imagine a story that opens with someone from present-day earth exploring an ancient tomb. They find an ancient scroll, leave, and start to translate it. There's a chapter break, and we are thrust into the story of the scroll. It tells the story of a forgotten empire fighting the magical forces of evil: orcs, demons, that stuff. Occasionally we get an interlude chapter from the POV of the explorer, them translating the scroll, or some other conflict that is happening in the present day. The contents of the scroll confuse the explorer, because magic isn't real. Obviously. But then, in one interlude chapter, an orc shows up at his door. 

That feeling of immersion is amazing. I have no idea why, but I love it. The best actual example I can think for this is those Pendragon books. We see the story from the eyes of the main character, who is relaying his stories to his friends via journals. (I think, I don't actually remember the books all that well, I think I only remember them because they use this technique. Don't even remember the names of the characters.) The friends aren't actually all that important, we see like 90% of the story through the main character's POV. But in the later books, when the friends all of a sudden go on the same magical adventure, and visit all the same places they had been reading about, it's so immersive. I have no idea why, it makes no sense. We, as the reader, have already been to these places when we saw them from the POV of the Main Character, all that's happening here is that we're seeing them again. And yet, it's somehow very different. 

Another great example of this is a fiction podcast I listened to once. I can't actually remember the name of the podcast, but the story is this: A guy is in an accident and falls into a coma. When he wakes up, he finds that he has been receiving emails with some audio files attached to them. The audio files are recordings of his old friend. The files have all these crazy, creepy things happening on them. Very supernatural. And then the guy starts trying to find his friend, but its like she's been erased. He then talks to people that knew her, and they can't remember her. The structure of the podcast is that each episode opens from the POV of the guy, goes into an audio file from the friend for 90% of it, and then closes with the guy again. So the majority of the story is from the girl's perspective, she has all the super intense really paranormal things happening to her. And yet, when tiny little paranormal things start happening to the guy, it feels so much more real. It's immersive, it's epic, it makes no sense, and I love it. 

So do any of you know if this technique has a name? Any other suggestions for works of fiction that use it? Because I really really like it, and I don't know why. 

Edited by Dannex
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It can be referred to as a framing device or as a framing story: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FramingDevice

A few good examples are:

 

And, as @Eri said, as a story within a story.

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Yeah as @Ixthos said, it's a story within a frame story. The elements you're describing where the story is delivered through in-world scrolls/journals/audio files is called epistolary storytelling (though epistolary technically refers to letters, these days it applies to pretty much any sort of documentation). So what you're specifically describing is epistolary storytelling within a larger frame story.

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