Breaking the Fourth Wall

Do you ever break the fourth wall in any of your works? How do you handle it? Are there any ways you think it should be handled?

edited 26th Dec '11 9:36:02 PM by MechaJesus

I tend to strongly dislike outright breaking the fourth wall, especially when used for comedy. It's cheap and overused. I might play with it a lot, but I am very reluctant to outright break it, though I did use to be a little less concerned on the issue.

Not in continuity. I have a vague plan for a humorous interlude chapter outside of continuity, in which an avatar of me shows up and everyone promptly starts beating on him for all the shit they're going through.

In one of my own stories, a character has the ability to open windows into alternate universes not unlike the style in His Dark Materials. At the beginning as he experiments with his new found power, he cuts open a window to find me typing out the narrations on my computer. I inform him of my authority but he doesn't believe me and the episode ends there. The incident is never mentioned again and assumed to be played just for laughs until the ending when I become Chekhov's Gunman through reference.

inb4 hurr durr responding to my own thread

edited 27th Dec '11 9:08:18 AM by MechaJesus

My main work, Project Arashi, hits every point on the scale with practically every character being an offender at one point or another, but generally they're one-off sight gags per chapter used to bleed some tension or provide a brief facepalm. With works like Bi A and Stardust, which are more serious military fiction, I demonstrate to my buddies that I actually can not abuse the fourth wall, just that I tend to choose not to.

edited 27th Dec '11 9:15:44 AM by Cganale

The total breakage of the fourth wall doesn't bother me too much when it's done well. But when it's not done well, or when the author is just leaning on the fourth wall, that's where I tend to really hate it. I already have an extremely hard time suspending my disbelief, I don't need the author to completely ruin my attempts at suspending it.

edited 27th Dec '11 9:18:15 AM by fanty

I've only gone near the fourth wall in three works so far... in everything else, I tend to avoid even leaning on it.

The Mythology 101 Cycle is a full-on, Boston Legal-style No Fourth Wall project, where all the characters (the ones from our world, anyway) are at least vaguely aware they're in a fantasy story, and a rather campy one at that... many of them have Medium Awareness to some extent or other, and they like picking on how bad a writer their creator is.

The Spin-Off for that series, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, is a bit more subtle about it and emphasizes the Self-Deprecation to a greater extent by picking on the more lurid elements of my Signature Style... it's not uncommon for characters to say something like "X just happened? What is this, a Jeremy Frost novel?"

The Wind of Death, my Zombie Apocalypse novel-in-progress, is even lower-key than that, favoring Leaning on the Fourth Wall rather than outright breaking it. But it is still very meta... that's what you get when Those Two Guys are the main characters, and they're nerdy enough to be Dangerously Genre-Savvy.

I have occasionally painted the fourth wall. But breaking it except in the most backhanded manner has never appealed to me. (My personal favorite example has always been the "This isn't a Dale Brown novel!" in Storming Heaven, by Dale Brown.)

The thing I'm working on right now—of which I still cannot decide upon a title—is supposed to begin with a kind of author-induced literary Interface Screw. It's a bit like an inversion of the narrator's "explanation" at the beginning of John Barth's The Floating Opera, though I had not read any Barth when I came up with the idea.

Just to get a little more internal discussion going: Why did you decide to break or otherwise muck about with the Fourth Wall in your work? Why not? Why did you or didn't you do so in a particular way?

It would be cool to know these things.

I did it because the character the story follows is a smarmy, Genre Savvy whackjob, and because the occasional fourth wall sight gags are part and parcel for Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima.

My characters sometimes point out that I avoided making an obvious joke at scene X, where X is a funny scene number. Of course, seeing as that can be annoying to some, I'm thinking of outright removing that.

Also, an Author Avatar pops up every once in a while under an assumed name. The Author Avatar then interrupts someone when they try to point out what my name actually is, claiming that they've seen the credits already.

I bow to the master.

Like I already said, I prefer to avoid outright breaking the fourth wall because I think it's tacky, and overused when done for humor.

As far as "mucking about" goes, I use tropes like This Is Reality and Lampshade Hanging a lot, but it's not with the specific intent of playing with the fourth wall - given the massive media-influenced nature of modern society, I think it would be unrealistic not to have characters act like this (heck, I've seen some very lampshade-like behavior in my personal life). If zombies start popping up all over the world, it hurts my suspension of disbelief more for people to not at least think about how the situation does and doesn't resemble famous fictional Zombie Apocalypses, for example. This is why Genre Blind characters infuriate me so much.

Endless Conflict has one of the sturdiest Fourth Walls in existence so I don't break it there.

Somewhere else? I might if I can make it funny enough or good enough.

I see fourth wall breaking as a gimmick, so I try to avoid usage whenever possible. However, because it can be funny, I try to save it for when it can be most effective.

In my main stories, I have no reason to break it. Lean, yes, but not break. Breakage could shatter immersion.

Cross-overs I may write? Due to their potential meta nature, it's fair game.

edited 28th Dec '11 4:53:02 PM by chihuahua0

Wait, wait, wait - are you talking about writing cross-overs with your own works?

It's only a fantasy in my head, but yes.

But at most, if I make it big time, it'll be small side projects on the Internet.

edited 28th Dec '11 5:05:39 PM by chihuahua0

...Why?!?

...Why not?! Let me have my fantasies.

Mock dramatics aside, it's a serious question. Why would you want to write crossovers involving your own work?

For the fun of it. First of all, it's easier to arrange a cross-over between works you own than works other people own. You're less likely to run into trouble. There's the whole copyright issue, even if it's technically fan-fiction. Second, universes are more compatible (DC vs. Marvel can be a huge pain). Most of my works have a similar range, or at least those around the same tier.

Third, I sometimes think of my works as a whole as being in a metaverse. For example, older works have a certain amount of respect that other works don't. Certain characters (like ROSANNA from the Character Development Thread, or the Cosmic Cantina) are only suitable for works that are highly meta.

Since I only have one main work on my mind that actively breaks the fourth wall (it's my oldest, and therefore too much of an oddball to see the light of day for a while), cross-overs would be a good way to try out things that over-wise won't work in most of my more down-to-earth works.

Plus, wouldn't it be a good way to entertain the fandom? Even rough script-fics would be a good way to practice writing and engage the audience while they're waiting for a real novel to come out, and it's a way to have fun without having money on the line.

edited 28th Dec '11 9:36:49 PM by chihuahua0

This is the only point I disagree with personally. Unless meant as parody, cross-overs tend to be much less enjoyable then normal works, at least in my experience. If I was a fan of a series, and heard that the author was taking time off from writing the next work in that series to do a crossover, I wouldn't be terribly happy with them.

Two of my works (assuming I ever make one of them, which is looking doubtful as I hate it more and more) are technically in the same setting, so hey, crossovers totally work.

As for the fourth wall, meh, too post-modernist for me, and I'm not a comedy writer...

Like I said, leaning on the fourth wall isn't always post-modernist.