Yesterday I was reflecting on the fact that overwritten prose is no substitute for truth in writing - it's a law which I think applies on the macro as well as the micro scale. Just as an overblown phrase or paragraph can be used to compensate for a lack of clarity in thought, so a structure that is too tricksy can be used to disguise a fundamental weakness in the story you are telling.
You can tie yourself into complicated knots: say that you find it difficult to generate intimacy and intensity in the third person, so you switch to the first, then you find that you need more than one viewpoint in order to convey your plot, so you introduce several other first person narratives, then you find that it's all too confusing and consign half of what you've written to the back story because you're not sure what else to do with it. By the time you've reached this point you've lost sight of your original vision and your book is in tatters. Your time would have been better spent addressing your original difficulty, finding where the fault lines lie and testing them out, rather than over-elaborating everything to avoid the issue.
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