Do Your Characters Talk To Your Readers?

[BobbyBrandt]

I'm curious why people want to break the fourth wall in an erotic story. It works in comedy, because it's jarring and can be funny, like the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen's character pulls Marshall McLuhan from off screen and addresses the audience. But this quality is distancing in an erotic story, which I think usually works best by being immersive and keeping the reader in the scene as continuously as possible.

From "Our Love Saga"

Do you know how rewarding it can be to bring carnal pleasure to the sexiest sixty-year-old woman in the world? I’ll just tell you that she keeps my medicine cabinet free of Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra.

Oh, and that tan line fetish only gets better with time.

 

[oneagainst]

How does that work as a writer? Because ultimately, you still wrote it.

True, it's a conceit. But I think the task is to write the character well enough that she's able to have a countervailing opinion to yours as the author.

After 2M words, the question that fascinates me is: where do they go when we stop writing them? What would they do if they had a choice? The last Critical Response will have the FMC facing the existential issue... do the characters, like the authors who write them, also have a finite lifespan, or do they live forever in the stories?

It's okay, there's smut in there too. But, one thing I have learned on here (including even the LW anon comments section) is that we have an audience that is both smart and well-read. Throw in a bit of philosophy and see what happens.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Some of my narrators talk more explicitly to the reader than others.

...at a friend's college room, comforting her latest broken heart. I don't know what Laura sees in women, least not the ones she's gone out with. Obviously women in general are glorious. Like her. I told her so, while I was offering to cheer her up totally to the best of my ability, if you know what I mean.

She laughed as she sniffled. "Adrian, no. You're drunk. Pissed as a fucking newt."

I told her, that really wasn't a problem. It wasn't like I'd regret her in the morning or anything. Nor like being half-cut wasn't my normal state of affairs. If I couldn't get it up, that's what a man has a tongue for, right?

 

[TheWritingGroup]

In my story that comes out on Sunday, "Still Picture", the narrator talks to the reader constantly. It's a memoir she's writing, so I don't think it's exactly what you mean. She says things like, "I do fancy the occasional metaphor poetic. Perhaps my most attentive reader will have noticed?"

-Billie