On Smart Characters

I tried something a little different and I read a George R.R. Martin book! I’m still not doing A Song of Ice & Fire, especially since that series has no end in sight, but I did read A Knight of Seven Kingdoms. It went well. Don’t expect the Book Diary to be updated very much for a couple of days, though–I’m a bit busy.

We’re a bit more rushed than usual, given circumstances, but I hope this turned out okay.

On Smart Characters

Writing incredibly intelligent characters can be difficult. There are some cheats you can employ, and you tend to hear those when people are giving writing advice: smart characters can simply know things that you, the writer, have to look up or ask an expert about. Characters can come up with ideas on the fly that the writer has to think about for a very long time. It’s fine! The reader doesn’t have to know about them.

This being said, I’d encourage writers to actually know what they’re talking about on random topics like history, psychology, or mathematics. It’s not actually necessary for a good story, if the topic in question is quite niche; the audience probably doesn’t know one way or the other. The people who do know, however, are going to be very annoyed. My sister, who has some knowledge of medicine, gets more than a little frustrated watching The Flash when characters talk about things like looking at brain waves in 3D, or someone with a doctorate using an MRI on someone with a fragment of metal inside of his body.

We’re not asking for a professional’s level of knowledge, but knowing some basic things about how devices work, when put in the mouths of supposed professionals, is kind of important. Again, you can look these things up or ask a professional about them.

[I would avoid topics along the lines of, “Not many know this, but!” because so many of those are A) common knowledge and/or B) wrong. In the Pilot of The Librarians, for instance, the Librarian Flynn has to solve a riddle that involves the number of the Stations of the Cross. One character makes the accurate count, I think, but Flynn counters that it’s not how many are in the Bible. Well, no, because the Stations aren’t numbered in the Bible, and the practice is based on Catholic capital-T Tradition. That’s like asking the number of saints as saints in the Gospels.]

The real difficulty for me, though, is that you’ve got to convince the audience that a character is intelligent, and that can be tricky business.

There is the above-mentioned issue: characters who are meant to be authoritative shows that they don’t actually know jack about the subject at hand. But there are other problems, too. Mostly, this is regard to cleverness (which is different from just being knowledgeable). There’s a post that goes around, for instance, comparing Chigurrh from No Country for Old Men and Sherlock Holmes from Sherlock which amounts to this:

-Anton Chiggurh shows intelligence in the narrative by, before planning out an attack, scouting out the area, looking for what advantages the enemy may have, and preparing himself accordingly.

-Sherlock Holmes shows intelligence in the narrative by, somehow, knowing things that the audience has no way he could have known, making contingencies that require things that he had not the time or resources to acquire.

Essentially, Sherlock treats incredibly intelligent people as almost magic.

We are told again and again that this character is intelligent, but that manifests in ways that we can’t really measure: knowing things that we don’t even have a way of knowing that he could of known, doing things that don’t seem possible like learning languages quickly. To be fair, the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories do this, too, but Sherlock tends to try to rub in your face how much cleverer Sherlock is by mocking the audience at times.

A worse example is probably [sigh] Atticus from Iron Druid Chronicles. Other characters will fawn about telling us how clever the protagonist is, only for him to not think of incredibly obvious solutions. At one point, he doesn’t think to use his cut-through-anything-sword to free his friends from being chained to a tree, insisting that he needs the keys to the chains’ lock. There are tons of other examples–trusting people he keeps telling us can’t be trusted, avoiding the police by going about his ordinary daily business, and quoting Shakespeare at the drop of a hat–but that one with the chains and sword feels the most obvious to me. 

In cases like that, the character isn’t even like Sherlock; he’s not written as intelligent. He shows lower-than-average decision-making abilities, but because the author wants to have a smart character, and hasn’t actually thought about what decisions an intelligent person would make in those situations, there’s a very obvious disconnect. Unlike the Sherlock example, it’s not that the writer skips the step of showing us the intelligence, it’s that it’s plain old not there.

Sometimes writers try to get around this by making the supposedly clever character out-of-focus. Athena in Percy Jackson and the Olympians is, we’re told many times, incredibly intelligent, and Riordan mostly gets away with it because most of the decisions she makes are off-page, and her daughter Annabeth, who inherited the intelligence, makes pretty good strategic choices. The ones we see on-page, though, don’t seem to speak to an incredible intellect.

The movie version of Annabeth Chase is worse–we’re told that she’s a strategist, though her strategies tend to amount to ‘beat down the enemy’ or ‘run into situations she needs to be rescued from’.

If you’re writing a character who is meant to be supremely intelligent, or at least is stated by other characters to be moderately clever, and you’re not doing a subversion (like Miles in Glass Onion)--where other characters assume this person is intelligent, only to reveal that he or she isn’t–I’d advise you to go to beta readers. Have other people look at the text or script or whatever, and read it. 

Does it make sense for smart characters to make those choices? Ask yourself, and then ask other people if it makes sense, or if you’re having those decisions made so that the story can move in the way you want it, rather than what makes sense for characters to figure out. Is there a reason that a character can know these things? You don’t have to show the work in every instance, but if a character continually pulls specific answers out of nowhere, that’s a problem. Does a character actually think about ideas before voicing or putting them into action?

Just please, please don’t write an idiot, and then try to tell me that he’s a genius.

—