How To Write An Intelligent Character

Ok, it is pretty much proven fact that Magnificent Bastard and their Xanatos Gambit is one of the key elements of making story interesting. I want to use those tropes, but to be honest, I'm something of a dimwitted individual. Would you have to be smart to utilize those tropes? If not, how do I do it?

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I've read some of your posts, and you really don't come off as stupid to me.

Do you mean that you're simply not of the "planning and plotting" mindset?

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

Thank you for the kind words, although I have no idea how you can judge my intelligence based on my posts, but thanks anyway.

Yeah...I actually prefer Crazy Awesome World of Badass ruled by Rule of Cool. On the other hand, I also love characters who can pull Xanatos Gambit, like Light, Johan Liebert, Aizen, Izaya (you know, I should try to read something other than Manga...), The Joker. I want to have a Big Bad who is Badass Bookworm with Awesomeness by Analysis. I don't need to have him make a pretentious references to obscure sciences or philosophies like a pedant (I'm looking at you Kyon)  ^*

. On a related note, I haven't watched Gargoyles because it was never on TV whenever I watched.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

My biggest bit of advice is to think everything through carefully, and do a lot of rewrites. With my Xanatos Gambit character, I was halfway through when I suddenly figured out a neat way he could've tied up a loose end and furthered his plans at the same time. I had to rewrite a chunk of the story to deal with that change.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

Action and silence. If you don't feel comfortable with you ability to write 'smart'. Keep them quiet and show their successes in action. Let other characters comment on plans and how brilliant this and that is. Readers will fill in the blanks.

Sorry, I don't quite get it...

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

First thing you gotta understand is that "planning and plotting" are actually kind of stupid. Any idiot can sit there and make up these complicated plots and traps for the heroes to fall into, but if you look at them from an external perspective the blind spots in those plans are quite obvious.

Keep in mind what Sun Tzu once wrote: the best plans are often childishly simple. The reason there is because simple plans are flexible, complex ones are not. If you have this complicated scheme to use Sue Storm as a hostage to lure in Reed Richards, any number of things could go wrong—Reed may be on Mars and not know she's been captured, she may be suffering from a stroke and be a useless hostage in nine days, you may have kidnapped Jessica Alba by mistake, your communication equipment may break down, she may end up rescued by a completely different superhero, she could free her own damn self, whatever. If your plan was "blow up the Baxter Building" though, then even if Reed isn't actually there you've still cost him a resource.

Another way you can make a character smart is by having them incorporate real-world facts into their plans, which makes them a lot more credible even if you're taking artistic license with them. There's one Jon Pertwee serial where he uses a plastic sheet as a hot-air balloon to escape the Daleks. Its credible because it makes use of the fact that hot air rises and plastic is pretty much everything-proof (with bonus points because he actually does evaluate its tensile strength before using it), and you see that and you think "Wow, this guy is fucking intelligent." And, too, resourcefulness and thinking-on-your-feet are often far greater signs of intelligence than the ability to make fancy machines or come up with long-winded plans are.

Just a few thoughts.

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Xanatos Speed Chess is good like this.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

Is your character very observant?

edited 23rd Feb '11 6:51:19 AM by EldritchBlueRose

Has ADD, plays World of Tanks, thinks up crazy ideas like children making spaceships for Hitler. Occasionally writes them down.

Intelligence and planning are not necessarily correlated. There are plenty of intelligent people who fly by the seat of their pants, and there are plenty of intelligent chessmasters.

If you want to write a truly intelligent character, don't go to town with the arrogance and egotisms. The defining traits of intelligence are both mental flexibility and THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE ONE'S OWN MISTAKES.

I put that in all caps for emphasis because I can't seem to find any list of forum codes.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

^ There is some basic markup help to your top left when you make posts. You might want to look into that.

It also depends on what kind of intelligence you are shooting for. Is this character very knowledgeable, do they have the ability to quickly learn and apply things or are they skilled at raw cognitive data crunching?

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I agree with Kitten Dantes. Just don't forget common sense. Unless your character is just that visionary/unhinged to deliberately pick the nonsensical strategy.

edit: I should clarify. If you go the latter route I would prefer if the stupidity/insanity of the plan was lampshaded. Do have other characters lampshade flaws. The omniscient plotter type is way overdone and easy to mess up, IMO.

edited 23rd Feb '11 8:58:48 AM by melloncollie

"The defining traits of intelligence are both mental flexibility and THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE ONE'S OWN MISTAKES."

Nope, I've seen some inflexible, arrogant smart people. That's not the definition of intelligence - intelligence is being able to learn more quickly. So, if you have a kid with an IQ of 150, they're expected to learn about as much in a year as a normal kid at the same skill would've learnt in a year and a half. That's why they're ahead. Intelligence isn't knowing more, it's being able to learn more efficiently.

And then you can consider why they learn faster. One of the big things is abstraction ability. For example, imagine you have two kids who both know how to figure out the area of a square, and you teach them how to calculate the area of a parallelogram (basically you cut a triangle off one side and attach it to the other side, making a square). The kid with poorer abstraction just learns 'the recipe' without understanding the underlying principle, the better-abstraction kid figures out the underlying principle. Then you ask them both to calculate the area of a puzzle piece. The first kid's lost, because he/she wasn't taught how to calculate puzzle pieces. The second kid realizes that calculating the puzzle piece uses the same underlying principle as calculating the parallelogram. So kid 2 learns quicker because he learns more skills with the same lesson.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

You as the writer know what every character will do and (hopefully) why. A Magnificent Bastard will, as part of their magnificence, understand other people's motivatations and responses so, while they are not mind readers, they can predict reactions and plan for them. Look at Hans Gruber from Die Hard. He specifically wanted the FBI involved because they would cut the power to the building which would allow the magnetic locks to be released so he could get into the vault. The writer would have thought through this backwards from knowing that the FBI cuts the electricity in hostage situations to building in the idea of magnetic locks as a plot device to illustrate Gruber's intelligence and manipulative ability.

So to summarize: work backwards to display their intelligence, and allow the smarty pants to know more of what you know as the author.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.

(A note here: I did not mean to say in my post that intelligence, Magnificent Bastardry or a penchant for plotting have any real correlation, just that it might be that our OP's block and assumption of his own unintelligence comes from a lack of skill in the kind of complex, manipulative forethought that goes into most Xanatos Gambits. The essence of an effective one, however, has less to do with the plan than the ability to change it, however... Which is, as Ettina pointed out, sometimes quite difficult even in cases of technical genius.)

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

For Eldrithc Blue Rose and Alkhash, yes he is. His primary strength is his ability to absorb, analyze, and utilize large amount of info in a short time.

Personality-wise, he doesn't like boasting his knowledge because he hates pedant. Also, he doesn't actively go to endanger the protagonists because he doesn't have any clear goal: he prefers messing with them or sometimes even hang out with them. So he usually make plans that will drive the protagonists nuts yet make as little actual damage as possible.

Maybe he's not so much a Big Bad than a rather twisted Friendly Enemy...

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

Don't make him a viewpoint character if you don't think you can't hack it. Make his machinations be offstage. Impress the reader with mystery and awe.

Whatever you do, don't show that he's smart by making him use big words.

In this case I would work it backwards. Start with the end result you want (or the character hopes to achieve), then work out how they did it.

I am a nobody. Nobody is perfect. Therefore, I am perfect.

Exactly what I was going to say. Also as a writer you'll have the advantage of having more time. So you can spend hours or even days coming up with a smart idea the character would've came up with in less than a minute.

Help?.. please...

I've never really written a Magnificent Bastard myself. But honestly, what I see happen often, is stuff happens normally, right? But then when it comes to the fruition of events, based no the actions of said character, they somehow come out to be exactly how the Magnificent Bastard wanted, sometimes veering off entirely from what should have been expected. The Magnificent Bastard then will take credit for it, and explain what he did to get that to happen, or the characters will realize. Often I Lied is in there somewhere. It will probably require rewrites to pull off convincingly.

SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)

I think someone has mentioned this already, but make them a grandmaster at Xanatos Speed Chess. Pretty much every Chessmaster (good or bad), Guile Hero, (intended) Magnificent Bastard, and Magnificent Bastard wannabe I've ever written has been intended to be good at reactive thinking and constantly adapting their plans. It comes across as much more realistic then the long-term Xanatos Gambit that goes off without a hitch, and, at least to my mind, makes the character look more capable for being able to react to unexpected situations.

Needless to say, this tends to turn works into snafus of Thirty Gambit Pileups, but I personally consider that a good thing. Just be willing to have your master plotter lose if he's legitimately Out-Gambitted with no known backup plan ready - making your villain (or hero) unable to be outwitted is not a good idea.

Just to drop some random numbers, I'd say that any writer can "fake" a character that's about a standard deviation smarter than he himself is. So if the original poster has - and I'm being conservative here, he's probably smarter than that - an IQ of 115, he should be able to fake a 130 character. That's smart enough to impress most people.

Also don't worry about the character having to be erudite and good with words. About a decade ago, there used to be really some badly written articles in the member's magazine for Mensa Denmark (I don't know why or exactly when this trend ended, but it did). The ideas in those articles were usually good, but somewhat poorly explained, and with horrible spelling and grammar.

It's very possible to be smart without being good with words and knowing all sorts of scientific and philosophical references. If you know those, you can throw them at people to try to seem smart, trying to impress people, but it doesn't always work.

As for most action fiction, using the word "action" in the widest possible sense, there's a lot to be said for being able to improvise. Like Indiana Jones. Picture your character in the situation he is in, and his awareness of it, and his keen insight into the benefits of confusing and bewildering his enemies by doing the unexpected. Thinking fast, talking fast.

Ettina is wrong about IQ being proportional to learning speed. Someone with an IQ of 150 learns *much* more than 50% faster than a normal person.

He or she is right about one way in which intelligence works, though. Smart people learn by making sense out of the material and fitting it into a wider framework. Instead of memorizitation, it's a proces of internalization. Of understanding. So that's one thing that's very important. Smart people understand the world they live in. They have a much more detailed mental model of most - or sometimes all - aspects of the world. A higher resolution map, of how different world elements interact. In some cases those models may be wrong, though, for instance due to bias (plenty of highly intelligent people exhibit less intellectual humility than is warranted, although in my experience failure to check one's fact *is* more common down towards the normal range of the IQ scale). And such understanding isn't always conscious.

Also some really smart people have a tendency to make intuitive leaps, instead of following nice and mathematically precise paths of Sherlock Holmes-shaped logic. I imagine in some fields, such as science or detective work, after such an intuitive leap the smart person will have to do a lot of backtracking, trying to build/justify his conclusions, so that he can have the criminal arrested, or have his hypothesis published or tested. (There's also the risk that if a fictional character does this too often, the readers stop believing in him, even though everything is perfectly realistic, even if it is a downplayed version of the author's own life experience.)

"Just to drop some random numbers, I'd say that any writer can "fake" a character that's about a standard deviation smarter than he himself is. So if the original poster has - and I'm being conservative here, he's probably smarter than that - an IQ of 115, he should be able to fake a 130 character. That's smart enough to impress most people. "

But what is the OP smart at? Different smart people are smart at different things. I have studied military and diplomatic history for more then twenty years so I can come up with a plausible Xanatos Gambit . It took me a LONG time before I could make characters and even now I have a list on my computer of the tropes my characters exemplify because I need an artificial framework for psychology-because I am very definitely a Socially Awkward Hero and have a hard time as a people person.

If the OP cannot make a plan look real by describing it they needs must make it look real by not describing it. That is my point. Is the OP's character similar enough to the OP for him to comprehend him? I am not trying to belittle the OP; I have enough weaknesses of my own to be sure. I am just suggesting that if the OP doesn't feel able to create a Magnificent Bastard then this is an obvious shortcut.

You have time to think.

Your characters do not.

Exploit this.

Nous restons ici.