Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/814
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you're asking yourself this question, you may well have a problem, or... this could be normal writers' insecurity.

- Sherlock Holmes, say, was a polymath who was believable _because_ he was an unbearably obnoxious person who loved to show off his genius; James Bond is also a bit of a polymath in ins field, but impatient, careless, and a misogynistic womanizer; in both cases, these characters are pretty much infallible in their fields. (Almost.) We suspend disbelief, but Holmes and Bond are firmly two-dimensional. Does your character have vulnerabilities that would make them three-dimensional and believable? 
- Can this character have reasonably picked up these skills within a normal human lifetime? Is it believable that this character has skill A _as well as_ skill B, and so on? If the skills are somehow related, you'll have an easier time selling them to the reader. 

You have a few options when it comes to fleshing out such a character.

- Rewrite the character to either take out a few skills, or better yet, make the character a little shaky in some of them. Why should life be easy? If all problems are solvable, there's less conflict and danger. The skilled pilot is less interesting than the guy who's taken a few lessons having to _land that plane_. 
- Cast the character as two or more characters. That introduces other problems, and could kill any momentum you've got going. 
- Add some backstory to make these skills believable. Be careful with this one; you want to hint at why the protagonist knows how to fix a jet engine with a Leatherman _while it's running_, not tell an unrelated story about that time in a B-52 flying over hostile territory with an enemy agent trying to sabotage the mission. See how distracting that is? A fun backstory can easily take away from the main story unless it's very carefully crafted to move the main plot forward. 
- Ask yourself, since this character has picked up skills [foo], what would have driven someone to know all these things? 

If you still can't make up your mind about whether or not you have [a problem character](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue) in your story, you could decide to temporarily not worry about it, take advantage of the momentum you have going and finish the book, put it in a drawer, and look at it with fresh eyes in a week or two. (Number one piece of advice for writers: keep writing!)

All this advice is a shot in the dark without reading your work, of course, so please read this with several large salt licks handy.

Original score: 18