Author Thinking Time vs. Character Thinking Time

So, you have a battle! Or maybe a puzzle! Or maybe a mexican stand off.

Your character has their time, and they come up with an idea, and your plot goes on its merry way.

Then, months later, as perhaps you're rewriting it, or maybe just rebrainstorming it, you realize, wait, there was a way smarter thing they could have done!

But the question is, could they actually think of the same thing you did in what amounts to maybe a few minutes, or even a day?

I have this problem a lot.

Does anyone else?

This is part of how you cheat at writing characters smarter than you: have them think things up in a second without prompting that took you an hour of analysis. Of course, you also have to take into account what the character will be inclined to think in terms of and their preferred solutions, which is a characterization issue.

I read one book on writing that talked about how your characters can be more intelligent or clever than you because what could take you days to think about they could think about within seconds during a high-pressure situation.

Plus, the author knows all the variables involved.

So it depends on the character's intelligence in a certain area. If they're supposed to be a mastermind, you might want to reconsider it. If the character's an idiot, it's probably fine.

I think this is more of a problem with certain types of "fans" then it is with writing.

Huh? How so?

People have different levels and degrees of suspension of disbelief. Some readers might think an action taken by a character is justified while another reader might think "why didn't he do X? What an idiot!".

That is, if some fans, days after reading a scene, come up with a better solution then the characters did to a split-second problem and consider it a problem with the work, then that's their problem, not a failure on the part of the author.

Well, that's Fridge Logic, ain't it?

Well, a variation of it.

edited 6th Feb '12 2:58:36 PM by MrAHR

It's flawed Fridge Logic, is my point. And if it's extended from a "huh, they could have done this with better results" attitude to "they should have done this and the book sucks because they didn't", then that's not really a problem with the work, just the "fans".

The same book I mentioned also talked about "maximum capability", and despite how everyone isn't thinking rationally all the time, readers expect the character to be making decisions at their best, or something like that.

While it's acceptable to throw the Idiot Ball every once and a while, there will always be readers crying foul.

I think it's acceptable to set up a character as bad at improvising, or to set up circumstances under which she's too distracted to think properly.

(Actually, come to think of it, this was something Hancock handled relatively well. Towards the beginning, the titular superhero does serious damage to a train while saving a car on the tracks. It's argued that he should have just lifted the car up, and the guy in the car agrees, but remarks that everyone's missing something—because of Hancock, he's not dead, and the screwup doesn't invalidate that.)

The thing that really grated me when I was reading The Shamer Chronicles, was that the characters were obviously doing ridiculously sensible and smart things after just a few seconds of thinking simply because the author had a very long time to think it all through. So I would advise to not get overboard with this, you might come up with something so genius that it completely shatters the readers' suspension of disbelief. (Except for characters who've been established as very smart. Then you can go beyond-the-impossible with this sort of thing.)

I'd tend to think "What an idiot! Why didn't s/he just do X?" is a much more common type of reader backlash than "How did s/he think to do X?"

Since my main characters are ridiculously smart...

Well, sometimes I make it so it takes them a while to think about an important detail that could have been noticed earlier.

It's not just intelligence. Even if a character is approximately as intelligent as I am, neither genius nor fool, I have to think about their actions much longer than they do in-universe simply because they're different from me. For instance, one might immediately lie in a situation where I'd tell the truth without thinking, or vice versa, but it'd take a bit of time, spent considering their history, philosophies, and opinions, for me to stumble upon that realization. Putting yourself in somebody else's shoes just takes longer.

Plus, if they are more used to their abilities, they will be be quicker on their feet with it.

I tend to end up "thinking down" to a reaction a lot of the time, personally, since I'm in my chair and the characters are probably under pressure if not under fire. But I also made a sort of fair warning to it: task overload/thinking rapidly under pressure are things that are not only acknowledged in my works, but form essential parts of certain characters.

It varies with the individual character really. Split-second decisions often just instinctual and a person will often default to what they'd habitually do in similar situations, or have a panicked reaction and try the simplest solution. It's not all that likely that a character with little time to think is really going to come up with the best solution, unless it's a character like say, Cyclops, who is already established at being great at making complex decisions quickly.

Unless they have a bunch of formulas they know how to apply already.

When All You Have Is a Hammer…, etc. etc.

You don't need to be a brilliant strategist to memorize a few basic things.

The point of training is to ingrain certain reactions to certain things, etc.