As we have been saying throughout this monograph, every novel aspires to be credible, so that the reader feels it real while he is reading it.
That is why the use of embedded stories is an invaluable tool. Life is full of stories, we hear them on the radio, on television, in line at the bakery, at work, at home, sometimes we are the ones who tell them ... that's why they shouldn't be in our novel absent if we intend to make it look like real life.
This procedure, which gives great verisimilitude to the work, consists of inserting secondary stories into the main story, in what many call the procedure of the Russian dolls or the Chinese boxes.
Sometimes the characters themselves will be in charge of telling those stories, momentarily becoming narrators, other times it will be something they read in a book or in some media, or that they hear by chance, on television, on the radio or on the Bus stop. There are many ways to enter embedded stories, but the main premise is knowing how to masterfully open and close the parenthesis so that the inserted story is perceived as logical and natural rather than as a forced glue cutter.
It is also essential to note that It must be narrated in the style of the person who tells itIf it is a character, it will be narrated with its own voice, if it is a radio announcer who refers it, it will be narrated with the style that the announcers are supposed to be.
To finish this point, we can look back to see how in the literature this procedure has always been very presentUsing as an example neither more nor less than Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece, who pulls this resource with great success on more than one occasion. Other times, the procedure we are dealing with becomes directly the backbone of the work, such as Las Mil Y Una Noches, where the stories that Sherezade inserts serve the work to move forward ... and to save her life. night after night.