Isaac Stewart, interior artist for the Mistborn books and Rocket Road-Tripper joins us again for a discussion of the fourth wall, and the breaking thereof. We talk about the theatrical origins of the term, and how the technique it represents might be used by authors and others. We talk about why Howard broke the fourth wall a lot more in early Schlock Mercenary strips than he does now, and why Isaac broke the fourth wall in some video game writing he did. We also talk about when it would be absolutely, inarguably inappropriate to break the fourth wall.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians, by Brandon Sanderson, in which the 1st-person narrator, Alcatraz, breaks the fourth wall a lot.

Writing Prompt: Write something in which somebody is literally the son of a shark, and in which you break the fourth wall. Oh, and the fourth wall is the glass wall of an aquarium.

Audio Glitch We Hate at 3:13: For some reason we lost one channel of audio for about 20 seconds. That’s why this episode is monaural, and why between 3:13 and 3:34 the volume drops off a bit.

Related Linkage: Here’s a link to the article about the HBO Game of Thrones adaptation Isaac mentioned.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

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.

[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we are not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Isaac] And I’m Isaac.
[Brandon] We still have Dan on book tour. Yeah, Dan, sell lots of books. We decided that we would want… that this is the time to do a breaking the fourth wall panel because it’s something that… panel, I’m still in… I’ve been doing way too many science fiction conventions likely. A breaking the fourth wall podcast because this is something we all do. Howard uses his narrator, I’ve written the Alcatraz books which are very in-your-face breaking the fourth wall, and Isaac’s animation often uses a narrator to much dramatic and humorous intent. So let’s define it first. What is breaking the fourth wall? Howard?
[Howard] It’s a theater term. It grows out of the fact that when you are on stage there are three walls to the stage. Stage left, stage right, and the backdrop. Then there is an invisible fourth wall between you and the audience. When you break the fourth wall, you as a player on the stage are acknowledging the existence of the audience on the other side of that wall. It stops being a wall, start being a window or door or nothing. An example of breaking the fourth wall unintentionally in a… well, unintentionally, he did it on purpose. Samuel L. Jackson was doing a stage play and somebody in the theater answered their cell phone. Simon L. Jackson stopped performing, turned to that person and pointed at him, and in true Samuel L. Jackson form, cussed at him and told him to get out of the theater. That is breaking the fourth wall.
[Brandon] Right. That’s a very extreme example, but there are narrative examples as well.
[Howard] There are narrative examples that grow out of this theater tradition, but that’s where the word comes from.

[Brandon] Because a lot of you have probably seen the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off show in which Ferris Bueller will actually address the camera, acting as if for a few minutes he is speaking to an audience that he knows, and other times he is not. Howard, you will use your narrator. Tell me why you decided to use the narrator the way you do.
[Howard] There are jokes that I wanted to tell that were inappropriate for the characters to tell. If a character makes a certain kind of joke, it means the character has knowledge that the characters shouldn’t have. Once you give the character that kind of knowledge, it’s hard to back away from it. If the narrator has this knowledge, the narrator… the Schlock Mercenary narrator has a full understanding of human history and Galactic history and can throw commentary about any of these things at any time. And he has understanding of the culture that the reader is embedded in, and so sometimes the narrator addresses the reader directly and says, “If you were on this particular space station, boy, you’d be lost, because you can’t even find your way around New York City.” It’s a joke about you and modern culture and I used the narrator for it because at the time instinctively it felt right. I look back at it and I realized that was probably my subconscious telling me please don’t break the characters.

[Brandon] Right. Well, it allows you to have a method of mixing omniscient and a first-person voice. In a way, books… they’re a very different ways to do this, but any time we include, even as we talked about in our last one, a map in the book or we include epigraphs at the beginning of chapters were things like this, we’re taking one step toward breaking the fourth wall. It’s acknowledging that this book is indeed a book, a story for people who are not familiar with this.
[Howard] That’s where Ferris Bueller… at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the end of the credits, when Ferris Bueller says, “What? You’re still here? Go home.” He’s not just acknowledging that they are is an audience. He is acknowledging that we are in a theater. Then at the end of… was it Toy story? Yeah, it was Toy Story Two where Barbie kind of does the same thing. And she’s telling everybody, “Thank you. Go to the exits. Oh, my face hurts.” It’s a beautiful nod to Ferris Bueller and it’s an acknowledgment you’re in a theater and the theater has exits.
[Brandon] You do, earlier on, in the Schlock comic… you don’t do it very often anymore… you had the characters address the readers. Why did you stop? Why did you do it when you did it?
[Howard] I did it when… I did it when I did it because I didn’t know any better to not do it. I felt like… I was not… stammer, stammer, stammer. I was not well enough versed in any genre to realize that fourth wall breaking is dangerous and a lot of people just won’t find it funny. It’s often a cheap way to get a laugh and…
[Brandon] I think it’s overdone in comics, particularly in webcomics. And you’ll find… personally, this is just my armchair on it, but you’ll find that early webcomics… early in their cycle tend to do a lot more often than later, which is very interesting.
[Howard] I think that it is us as web cartoonists maturing as writers and realizing that that’s the easy joke, I need to make a better joke. Sometimes breaking the fourth wall is inherently funny, and inherently right, and needs to be done that way. And sometimes it’s the only joke we can think of and we really have to have an update today. I’ve done that once or twice. When Schlock shows up… it was an early strip where they were all running back from someplace and Breya says, “I see none of you brought back a punchline,” and Schlock says, “Well, my hands were full.” That was me saying I can’t think of a joke, but I need to tell this piece of the story. That’s just lazy writing, but I got away with it.
[Brandon] There are times to use it, though. You did… Isaac, you did these directions and I thought that the narrator in these animated sequences was an integral components of making it work.
[Isaac] There was a reason that we finally decided on that. We had tried several different things trying to get it to work and they were all too long. We needed to tell a quick bit of a story in about two minutes in between gameplay. We found that using a narrator number one could make it funny and number two it could get us from point A to point B in a quick time. But that’s some…
[Brandon] It allows you to contrast. You would have the narrator says something and the visuals you would show would be in contrast to that. Which is one of the classic ways to break the fourth wall and make it really funny, by having the narrator say, “And they were just fine,” as things are exploding and obviously the narrator got a different script or something like this.
[Isaac] Another thing that we did is we had the narrator argue with the characters. He’d pick on a particular character in particular.
[Brandon] You made the narrator a character himself. That… you establish this is kind of a narrator announcer man who narrates in this sort of verbose excited way and the characters are then like, “Wait, what?”
[Howard] Did you use radio voice? Effects?
[Isaac] It was very much a… how did it go? And now they are in space!
[Howard] Radio voice! Yeah. I’m the narrator and…
[Brandon] Very overdone.
[Howard] I was going to do… in early Schlock Mercenary strips, I was going to have the group teraport from one place to another and notice that the narrations are gone, and then the narrator shows up and says, “No, I’m not teraporting with you. That’s way too dangerous. I went the long way.” At the time, I thought that’s a funny joke, I need to find a way to do that. Then I realized, “No, that doesn’t just break the characters, that breaks the universe. It’s wrong, I can’t get away telling that one.”

[Brandon] We’re going to do an advertisement and then we are going to come back and talk about how to do this. The advertisement is actually for my book, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, which I haven’t talked about yet. But… we haven’t talked about it in the podcast yet. Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians… the entire shtick of it is Alcatraz the narrator writing this book and addressing you as a reader and playing with the form of what makes a novel. The first book has a very nice audio book read very well, and I think you will enjoy it. So go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse, give Alcatraz versus The Evil Librarians a try if you haven’t already.

[Brandon] I’m now going to talk about why I decided to do what I did with Alcatraz. Because when I sat down to write Alcatraz, I wanted to do something very different from what I had done before. That meant going in different directions, trying some really extreme things. Which for me was breaking the fourth wall. When I write my epic fantasies, I take a lot of… I make a lot of effort to never pull the reader out of the story. It’s full immersion. I want it to be internally consistent and internally cohesive. The moment you break the fourth wall, you lose credibility in that area.
[Howard] You lose all of it.
[Brandon] You lose all of it. So the book becomes something very different. Now, there are ways to address the reader with a narrative that doesn’t completely throw you out. I mean, Tolkien almost does it a couple of times when he’s using omniscient in…
[Howard] Tolkien almost does it. Terry Pratchett’s footnotes flirt with it pretty close. The… they walk the line. But because they are footnotes, we will accept them as being outside the text and it’s acceptable.
[Brandon] Well, and both of those kind of have a more present narrator than a lot of what I’m trying to do. So when I did Alcatraz, I wanted to have a very present narrator who was playing with the form of the novel. Breaking the fourth wall allowed me to do this. When I start with a cliffhanger and then say starting with a cliffhanger is a really annoying thing to do, it suddenly builds a character for Alcatraz the narrator who becomes someone interesting. That’s another depth to the books. I will tell you the danger of this is some people hate it. Some people absolutely detest it. You as listeners… some of you might absolutely detest it. It’s doing something completely different. There are those who read the Alcatraz books for just a few pages and say this is not for me because this breaks the story.
[Howard] Alcatraz was my first Brandon Sanderson novel. Sandra read it to me while I was working… the audio book version wasn’t available yet. She read it to me. I interrupted her a couple of times and I said, “Seriously? Brandon is getting away with this?” Because I knew enough about the way fiction is written to know that you weren’t just experimenting with the form, you are taking three or four rules at once and saying I’m going to break all of them at the same time including pointing at myself doing it. Then I’m going to move ahead and go on with it anyway. You know what? What you said about that defining Alcatraz’s character? I didn’t figure that out until about halfway through the book. Once I twigged to it, I realized, “Oh, he’s a genius. This Brandon Sanderson. He’s brilliant.” I just wish I’d figured it out sooner.
[Brandon] Well, it certainly does create a feel for the Alcatraz books that… take it… like it or dislike it, it’s there. I think this is one thing when we were talking about this podcast earlier that Howard pointed out. If you are going to break the fourth wall, you really need to make a decision as a writer. How am I going to use this as part of my story? What is… it’s got to be something consistent. Because if you just do it once… if throughout the entire Schlockoverse, one time Schlock looks at the camera and mentions something, that part is going to stand out so much that it could undermine your story. It either needs to be part of the shtick or it needs to be left out completely.

[Howard] Once is too many. If you only ever do it once, that was one time too many. But if you do it 10 times, 10 times might also be too many depending on how you’re doing it. There’s this happy medium in there, and you as the writer listening to this podcast… is that breaking the fourth wall? No, we know the audience is there. There is no fourth wall. You, dear listener, are going to have to make that decision. You’re going to have to find where that balance is and strike it very carefully.
[Brandon] It’s… did you have something?
[Isaac] I was just going to say, it’s kind of like the cohesion we’re talking about in the previous podcast. Like a painting or the colors don’t match, it will stick out like a sore thumb in a book. Making sure that the cohesion and the colors match in a book…
[Howard] We had that… when we talked about humor, and we talked about Warbreaker. You and I had some really interesting conversations in the gym where early on in your wrestling with… was it Moshe or Joshua?
[Brandon] Moshe, my editor.
[Howard] in your wrestling with Moshe over these jokes, the two of you did not yet realized that the problem with the jokes wasn’t that the jokes weren’t funny… which I think was Moshe’s first stab at it. Hey, these jokes aren’t funny. Of course they’re funny. But that the jokes were breaking the fourth wall in small ways…
[Brandon] Yeah, very small ways. This is something… this is a very good point to bring out, because I didn’t realize I was breaking the fourth wall. The reason I was breaking the fourth wall…
[Howard] And neither did Moshe?
[Brandon] No, we didn’t. What was happening is I was referencing… I was taking one step too close to referencing things in this world. A lot of new writers try to make a pun off of a cliched term that we have in our world… a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush or this sort of thing, where you use one of these terms and then you make a pun off of it and ha ha, it’s funny. Except by making that pun, you are implying that in world they have that same idiom. Which then destroys the sense of cohesiveness. These are the sorts of things I was doing. None of them were addressing the reader, but I would reference like an Earth animal. Just, I would be making the assumption, oh, they have horses, so they have this Earth animal. But Moshe was saying, “No, they are in a tropical environment. Your setting this in a Hawaii-like area. They’re not going to know this animal even exists in the world.” You’re breaking the fourth wall in order to have a joke. We didn’t even realize that was the problem. I think this is a serious issue for new writers. Breaking the fourth wall accidentally or taking two steps toward it, is something you need to be aware of.

[Isaac] It might be the note of a lazy writer, too. Because if you sit and think about the world, you may come up with new ways to do this. I was reading an article today about a linguist that they hired to do a language for the Game of Thrones HBO TV series. He came up with something like 1800 words for the horse riders, I forget their name. Some of the idioms that he came up with were things that had to do with horses, or the word for dream was something like wooden play because in their culture, wood was considered to be false or fake. So they add that into all of the different words, and it played out through that whole language. But it would be the same thing.
[Brandon] Exactly. Robert Jordan is very good at this, I personally think, if you look at his viewpoints written from characters who are outside of the ideal or things like this. But one of the things you’ll learn… and we’ll probably end right after this… but one of the things you’ll learn if you study other cultures is that sometimes some things do transcend culture. For instance, we have the phrase in English, “speak of the devil.” Well, in Korean, they have a phrase that says [omitted, because I have no idea how to transcribe it] “if you say the name of the tiger, he will come.” Which is exactly the same idiom, and it’s because we’ve noticed the same thing. But in world, they are not going to use “speak of the devil” in a world.
[Howard] I think the idiom in French… I don’t know the French… is “speak the name of the wolf and lo, he appears.”
[Brandon] Yeah. So you can use some of these things to say look, human experience… humans are humans… they will notice these things. But make it in world rather than using the phrase that we use, and suddenly you will have world building, you will have cohesion, and then you can make a pun off of that if you wanted to make a joke.
[Howard] That’s what my narrator is for. He points out that… there was a moment where two characters are talking and one of them says, “Just because the two words sound alike, doesn’t mean you should be expecting any mercy from the mercenaries.” The narrator says, “Interestingly, this pun works as well in Galactic Standard East as it does in English.” There, I’ve broken the fourth wall twice, and because I did it the second time, it worked.

[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.