Links posted on April 14, 2009
Person from Porlock, a 200-year-old literary meme. According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poem Kublai Khan came to him fully-formed as he slept; but while setting it to paper he was interrupted by an unnamed Person from Porlock, and returned to his desk with only threads of the idea remaining.
Not a MacGuffin or a Proof in a too-cramped margin or an Alan Smithee, it hangs on either side of the fourth wall: outside it, an interloper who disrupts the author's flow, or within the story, a transient figure who acts to redirect events.