The art of smarts. Why is it so difficult to write intelligent characters?

[Paul_Tromba]

I am not claiming to write smart characters. Pretty much all of my characters just do whatever I feel that they should do based on their personality and the information I have given them. Does this mean that they always succeed? Not at all. In fact, most of the time they either fail miserably or barely get by. I feel that it gives a more realistic nature to them. Now, there are a few characters who are smarter than the rest so when I realize something that I never thought of before that matches with the information given then I have those smarter characters bring it up. Because of this, I've had a few people say how smart some of the characters are. However, most of the time I'm told that my characters are idiots.

 

[SakeVision]

Because the writers want to bend them to the plot, and don't get in their heads. It's not hard to write intelligent character, but it's hard to make the story play out exactly like you want if everyone is smart.

 

[lnv]

Writing good characters is hard in general, but one of the hardest things to convey is intelligence. You have to strike a fine balance. Make your character solve difficult problems too quickly and easily will leave readers feeling like the solution was an asspull. The most common way of dealing with the asspull problem boils down to this; the solution is forshadowed -> problem is presented -> character solves problem. If the solution was already foreshadowed then it isn't an asspull right? All this ends up making intelligent characters very formulaic. There is also the problem with stupid writers, who are unable to unable to understand intelligence. They end up using asspulls to the point their character basically has magic powers.

As mentioned, a character can't be smarter than the author.

That said, there are a few important things to consider when writing an intelligent character:
1) Stop telling people the character is intelligent. Unless all you get is the end result and the character doesn't show up much, thus their intelligence can't be really evaluated by the reader. The more you point out how intelligent they are, the more people will scrutinize their actual intelligence. The biggest weapon in an author's arsenal is actually things not shown.

The more you put something in a reader's face, the more it gets scrutinized.

2) Stop trying to make the MC into some super genius. If you want the MC to seem smart to the other characters, aim at things with high barrier to entry. Aka, it shouldn't be something simple that someone would figure out even by accident. But the more barrier to entry something has, the less likely it would be found out by others.

Because as is, most don't write smart MCs, they just write stupid side characters. So instead, it is better to make the side characters smart as well and let them solve their own problems. Thus, the MC would have less opportunity to make a fool of themselves trying to pretend to be smart. And the side characters won't look stupid either. And MC can show off here and there with solutions on things with high barrier to entry making them look actually smart. Not an average person with retards all around.

If you want to cheat a bit, look at history at when something came to be. If it came to be sometime in BC or in first 1500 AD, it most likely isn't hard to figure out.

 

[greyblob]

Writing good characters is hard in general, but one of the hardest things to convey is intelligence. You have to strike a fine balance. Make your character solve difficult problems too quickly and easily will leave readers feeling like the solution was an asspull. The most common way of dealing with the asspull problem boils down to this; the solution is forshadowed -> problem is presented -> character solves problem. If the solution was already foreshadowed then it isn't an asspull right? All this ends up making intelligent characters very formulaic. There is also the problem with stupid writers, who are unable to unable to understand intelligence. They end up using asspulls to the point their character basically has magic powers.

not much has changed - my answer is still the same.

Do you seriously think the series with Benadict Cumberbatch was good writing? That is probably the best example in the mainstream of a poorly written "intelligent"

The show is the flamboyance of intelligence, all show and no substance. There seems to be talk about how a character's intelligence is independent of that of the author, and honestly, I can't even fathom the thought. The 'characters' are not people. They are not alive. You could argue that an author has no conscious effect on them, but there's always an unconscious one. They'll be influenced one way or another.

 

[KoyukiMegumi]

I am not claiming to write smart characters. Pretty much all of my characters just do whatever I feel that they should do based on their personality and the information I have given them. Does this mean that they always succeed? Not at all. In fact, most of the time they either fail miserably or barely get by. I feel that it gives a more realistic nature to them. Now, there are a few characters who are smarter than the rest so when I realize something that I never thought of before that matches with the information given then I have those smarter characters bring it up. Because of this, I've had a few people say how smart some of the characters are. However, most of the time I'm told that my characters are idiots.

I currently have a character whose plans work about 1% of the time and most of the time they have to think on the fly. xD


Lloyd, characters are simple. The important thing is to show rather than tell. Maybe a combination of the two. Show how dumb a character is by making them fail to understand a situation or cause the downfall of a plan because of their part. The same happens with smart characters, show where they excel. How they can solve the problem posed by dumb person A who tripped over a wire setting off the alarms. This can be by altering the plan on the fly, and still receiving the same outcome. Ex. All of them make it out alive.

*Important to show how they arrived at plan C* Their thought process is very important.

The important part of a good character is consistency. This doesn't mean a smart character can't do dumb things. Like Ex. MC sees one of their friends die in front of them. That can lead anyone to do bad choices, even the smartest person alive.

Just don't skip steps, show how they solve problems and keep them the same as they interact with the plot. And if there are changes, show why they are happening.

 

[Lloyd]

I currently have a character whose plans work about 1% of the time and most of the time they have to think on the fly. xD


Lloyd, characters are simple. The important thing is to show rather than tell. Maybe a combination of the two. Show how dumb a character is by making them fail to understand a situation or cause the downfall of a plan because of their part. The same happens with smart characters, show where they excel. How they can solve the problem posed by dumb person A who tripped over a wire setting off the alarms. This can be by altering the plan on the fly, and still receiving the same outcome. Ex. All of them make it out alive.

*Important to show how they arrived at plan C* Their thought process is very important.

The important part of a good character is consistency. This doesn't mean a smart character can't do dumb things. Like Ex. MC sees one of their friends die in front of them. That can lead anyone to do bad choices, even the smartest person alive.

Just don't skip steps, show how they solve problems and keep them the same as they interact with the plot. And if there are changes, show why they are happening.

The question was rhetorical. Im just starting a conversation not asking advice.

 

[KoyukiMegumi]

The question was rhetorical. Im just starting a conversation not asking advice.

Ah, :3 well, my advice is there for anyone who may need it.

 

[Lloyd]

Ah, :3 well, my advice is there for anyone who may need it.

I think making a real intelligent character is probably the hardest type of character to pull off. Basically 90% of series fuck it up and write a ton of asspulls.

 

[Zirrboy]

I'm a simple person with low requirements towards anything but MC reception. Flamboyant asspull done well enough to be entertaining does it for me.

 

[KoyukiMegumi]

I think making a real intelligent character is probably the hardest type of character to pull off. Basically 90% of series fuck it up and write a ton of asspulls.

It's hard. True, I think about 95% of the stories fuck it up hard.

It all depends on the intelligence factor they are going for. For someone more intelligent than the average man, let's say a full-fledge Einstein. A character like that requires extensive research, so what comes out of their mouth makes 100% sense to no one. Their language tends to be top-tier scientific and their thought process is more chaotic than organized.

They can see a problem 100 steps away, and that makes it hard to convey into writing.

Kind of like writing a doctor or renowned surgeon. Most of their lingo won't make sense to anyone else other than a person working in the same field. Then comes the hard part of having to dumb everything down for the average reader to understand. And there is where most novels come crashing down. They either fall flat and make the intelligent character like the average joe, or they are too complicated to follow.

 

[T.K._Paradox]

Yeah intelligence is a hard thing to show, I think is because most people try to equate intelligence to problem solving skills much of the time, and either use the most basic bitch puzzles or make the character a magical genius.

I think making a real intelligent character is probably the hardest type of character to pull off. Basically 90% of series fuck it up and write a ton of asspulls.

*Cough* Rey from Star Wars *Cough*

 

[LunaSoltaer]

Intelligent characters, very tricksy bastards to write. Fun times talking with my host about this subject.

As this isn't a place for actual advice, one can find that all over the place, I'll just throw my 2 coins at the question in the forum title because to hell with rhetoric.

Has anyone ever played a TTRPG with munchkins? You know, those little player-gremlins who concoct diabolical evil plans to ruin your game balance and derail the plot so thoroughly as to make the GM cry in tears? Those engineering types who construct a ballista bolt using a bag of holding and a portable hole to create a 10foot AoE nuke-everything-bomb? That tag-team of Sniper who can hit anything in a 1-mile radius and Wizard who can tell said Sniper where and when anything is?

Part of the social convention of TTRPGs is respecting the intended plot, and selecting your character moments to drive the plot forward and connect the player characters together to make everyone feel welcome and included, because otherwise you get what a cast of intelligent characters would actually try to do:

Rip your plot to shreds by picking actions that actually serve THEIR interests rather than YOURS (You being the author). The only real hard counter to this while keeping every character intelligent is meticulous worldbuilding and plot planning to coax your intelligent gremlins characters into acting in a way that benefit the plot. Why is this necessary with intelligent literary characters and not intelligent player characters?

PCs are driven by Players, who see the plot, and social contract in play, and have a vested interest in upholding both. Not so for Literary Characters/NPCs. As far as the characters in a book are concerned, plot doesn't exist. They have their goals and motivations, and have no reason to care about or respect what some mortal nonmagickal human that doesn't even fucking exist (the author) has to say about anything.

(There's also that when writing about characters that know fancy shit, you the author have to know that shit, and preferably know it at least one grade above what your characters present. So if you have a character that, for example, knows that you can find the vertex of a parabola by solving 2ax + b = 0 and plugging that answer in to get y, YOU should know what a derivative is, know several of the less-difficult ones, and ideally be able to derive the one your character used from scratch. For your character to know it works, you need to know why x3)

Okay this is more than 2 cents, but this may be of help to someone?

 

[Snusmumriken]

Intelligent characters dont mean prophetic characters that know the answer in advance, They can struggle and they can be wrong. What puts them on the forefront and usually makes them reach the correct conclusion is the speed at which they juggle possibilities and discard failed theories. And that can be achieved by many means:
1) Knowledge of shortcuts. you can cut a lot of thinking time by knowing answers to certain steps in advance. Think multiplication table. You might not know what the answer to 37*26 be but you know you can split it into 37*25+37 and then further expand it into (37*100)/4+37 and solve it much faster in your head than a person trying to calculate step by step.
2) knowledge of obvious failures. ability to quickly discard obvious dead ends allows you to waste less time on them.
3) general knowledge and an open mind -sometimes you can't get to the correct conclusion unless you are willing to entertain multiple approaches instead of locking yourself in the first one that looks plausible.
4) plain old intelligence - some people are generally faster from jumping from one argument to the next in the chain of discovery. think of the solution as a series of steps and really intelligent people are capable to jump over some of these steps, quite often subconsciously and most likely due to the factors mentioned above.

And yes you can write characters more intelligent than you are. Heck, I have a few of these myself. The difference is that what they might think or talk about in a few minutes takes me a few days to think through. it is like a lever, I am trading the speed for the intelligence increase.

 

[OokamiKasumi]

Simple Tips for Writing Genius Characters​

https://allwritealright.com/simple-tips-for-writing-genius-characters/

Summary:
1 Avoid Stereotyping Your Character
2 Don’t Overcompensate with Vocabulary
3 Never Take the Easy Way
4 Know the Different Breeds of Intelligence
5 Do Your Research
6 Know the Limits of the Character’s Intelligence
7 The Intelligent Perspective
8 Make the Character Smarter than Your Readers (And You)
9 Convince Your Readers that Your Character is a Genius

 

[Comiak]

The key to writing intelligence is actually quite simple. Intelligence is all about problem-solving ability. It is their ability to solve problems that makes the audience perceive them as intelligent.

In order to show off their problem-solving capability, you need to lay out the problem like a puzzle and lay it out in a way that the audience can follow. Then, you give the character's solution by having the character work their way through the problem one step at a time, and every step should seem perfectly reasonable to the readers.

EDIT: Of course, the intelligence of the author helps a lot. I have a plot-line set up for my story where my MC needs to get one nation to declare war on another. They do so by telling the nation they want to instigate the war about a silver mine that happens to be located along one of the nation's major trade routes. The mine creates a boom-town, the boom-town starts buying up all the food the trade-wagons bring in, and an unrest starts to rise in the capital. This means the king needs a way to solve this problem, and they very conveniently happen to have a lot of money to throw around with this new silver mine. So, they start gearing up for war.

Knowing about cause and effect relationships like that tends to really help in writing smart characters.

I was going to say something along the lines of this.

Let the character work through the problems in thought text so the readers knows what going on through the character's mind and as long as you make the conclusion add up you'll have no problems. if you can't for some reason make the conclusion add up you can turn it into a gamble, like there being three different possibilities and the character has to choose one, in that case you can throw in hunches to bridge the gap if there is lacking evidence.

 

[MrPasserby]

I am not claiming to write smart characters. Pretty much all of my characters just do whatever I feel that they should do based on their personality and the information I have given them. Does this mean that they always succeed? Not at all. In fact, most of the time they either fail miserably or barely get by. I feel that it gives a more realistic nature to them. Now, there are a few characters who are smarter than the rest so when I realize something that I never thought of before that matches with the information given then I have those smarter characters bring it up. Because of this, I've had a few people say how smart some of the characters are. However, most of the time I'm told that my characters are idiots.

Make everyone dumb then the mc, in way, becomes smart. I know it's weird, but we can't deny the possibility.

 

[Paul_Tromba]

Make everyone dumb then the mc, in way, becomes smart. I know it's weird, but we can't deny the possibility.

No, I have to write my MC as either a dumbass or average so that he can learn over time and have proper growth as a character. Other characters have to be smarter so they can fix the MC's dumbass choices when needed. In theory, your idea could work. However, I am too dumb myself to be able to pull it off properly.

 

[Kilolo]

just search some random trivia on the internet (like how all polar bear are left handed, lily of the valley are poisonous, or how to make a chloroform using household appliance) and make it the main character showing it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world while all the other character dumbfounded by the fact.

detective conan been doing these for more than a thousand chapter and people are convinced that the MC are an intelligent character.

even though he's not.