Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 16: Breaking the Fourth Wall

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/04/25/writing-excuses-4-16-breaking-the-fourth-wall/

Key points: Breaking the fourth wall is a term from theater, when an actor addresses the audience (who were behind the invisible fourth wall). Narrators can have knowledge that characters can't, and address the reader, without breaking the characters or story in quite the same way. Anything that reminds the reader that this is a book breaks (or at least bends) the fourth wall. Once is too many, but the writer has to hit the happy medium if they are going to break the fourth wall.
( What about theater in the round? )
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to force Isaac to give us a writing prompt.
[Isaac] Awesome. I was thinking about these different cultures. In the Philippines, one of their kind of pseudo-cusswords is [they san anok nun pating? Roughly?] which means, "son of a shark!" So your writing prompt is to write a story where somebody is really a son of a shark and breaks the fourth wall which happens to be the glass wall at an aquarium.
[Howard] But no lava girl.
[Brandon] But no lava girl. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.