How to write strategy and schemes beyond my real-life capabilities?

One of the things I find most powerful for constructing strategies or schemes which may go beyond what the author could do themselves is show don't tell. If you tell the audience what the strategy is, they can poke holes in it. "What if X happened?" "What if Y didn't show up?" However, if you show them what happens, that's all they have. It's frustratingly hard to distinguish brilliance from madness.

Somewhat case in point, I had an English teacher who admitted that he and his friends liked to play Chicken with cars when he was a young and foolish age. They'd all stand on the curb, wait for a car, and then try to run out in front of it to the other side of the road. The guy who left the curb last was the cool cat. He was the one that had the real brass balls.

My teacher was the guy with the cojones. Nobody could ever figure out how he managed to leave the curb that late without being totally freaked out. He never told them. He just showed them. Over and over, he won the game.

Many years later, seeking to put us students on a less reckless path, he let us in on the secret. He told us how he did it. In all reality, he was too scared stiff to leave the curbside. It terrified him. So he remained frozen in place until his raw desire to stay "in" with his friends broke free the mental cement that held his feet in place and he quickly fled in the winning direction. But he never told them that! He showed them the cool kid.

posted about 5 years ago

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Cort Ammon - Reinstate Monica‭

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The author doesn't need to have the same tactical genius of those characters, because the writer has a serious advantage.

As an author, you know everything and you can change everything of your story. You almost have omniscience and omnipotence over your fictional world. I say almost since you won't know every detail immediately - especially if you are a discovery writer - but surely you know more than the characters involved.

You don't need insight, since you don't need to make any "prediction" on future events. What you need is to portray your characters as insightful, intelligent, innovative or sly. And that's just a matter of portrayal! How do you portray a character as brave? You make him face his/hers fear. You make him/her confront danger.

Showing tactical mastery might be slightly less straightforward, but it can be done still. You have to keep in mind that the characters, unlike you, don't know everything about the world and are working with limited resources.

Let's say the heroine Alice, tactical genius in a medieval setting, has to lead her ragtag rebel army against the Evil Dark Tyrant™ Bob. You already decided that Alice has to win the battle for plot reasons, but of course, she doesn't know that. And her victory has to be believable and portray how much a good strategist she is - she can't just pull fresh troops out of nowhere, erase the enemy army with make-believe magic, or anything like that.

So, how can she win? To her, winning the battle must be like solving a puzzle - maybe crossworld one. Ask yourself: what does Alice know ....

• About the enemy's generals?
• About the enemy's information network? What do they know? What do they believe? Are there blind spots in their knowledge?
• About the enemy's army? Composition, average size, location, morale? Possible weakpoints? Possible points of strenght?
• Who will lead the enemy's army? Bob himself or someone else? How did he fare in other battles? Is there any peculiar / recurrent trick or strategy he uses? Does he rely much on something?
• About the battleground? Can she pick a battleground of her choice? Is she forced to lay siege?
• About her own generals, her own armies and strenght? Her own supply line?

Alice must try to answer those questions in order to plan. Some of those will be difficult, if not impossible, to answer. As the leading general, she must have a network of spies/messangers/scouts tasked with providing her with useful informations. Some will be reliable, some will be misleading. She has to listen and make assumptions in order to formulate her plan. If you show this, you will show how versed she is in dealing with strategy. Quoting Sun Tzu's Art of War:

Every battle is won before it's ever fought.

and so, a great deal of tactics happen way before the actual battle (or war). When she's finished gathering information, Alice's goal should be maximizing her gains while minimizing her losses. That usually means winning with the fewer cost in terms of lives/resources lost, (of course it all depends on what Alice wants. Maybe she's not so protective of her men).

In order to do so, she might...

• ..leverage one of her strenghts against the enemy,
• ..make use of the enemy weaknesses or blindspots,
• ..trick the enemy into doing something - falling into a trap or in a predicted behaviour

We could make countless examples of what are good tactical moves. For example, if the enemy is known for relying on a strong cavalry, the number one priority could be negate his cavalry. Alice could choose to fight upon a hill, in a marsh, build trenches, deploy pikemen, and so on.

Like a chess game. You both need powerful and less powerful pieces, but what you need most is the ability to outthink and outmaneuver your adversary. This means that you can see "farther" that he does - meaning you can predict a greater number of moves into the future. A simple example of that, often show is movies, is the Feigned Retreat: you make your army run away from the front line, in order to make the enemy think you are fleeing. If the enemy falls into the trap and pursues, there is a good chance that its soldiers will break formation, becoming more vulnerable to your retaliation.

There's surely a lot to consider, and it might be a lot to take in. I do recommend some books on military tactics - I have already mentioned Sun Tzu, but others may be found.

Now, if you want to have multiple strategists in your novel (as, for example, in game of thrones) things will get a little more complicated. Now it's not only Alice and Bob playing chess, but it's 10 playes on a very odd, 10-sided, four dimensional chessboard. Yet the basic rules are the same - tacticians will try to get information, predict what their enemies will do, and try to outsmart them.

posted about 5 years ago

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Liquid‭

770 reputation 44 140 116 3

Your main advantage as a writer is that you KNOW what is going to happen.

Dumb example first to make a point
I have an IQ of 100. I am writing someone who has IQ of 1000. He says "I am so smart I can predict a coin flip!" The coin is flipped. "Heads!" my character calls. The coin falls heads.

There, I wrote someone so smart that he can predict coin flips at IQ 1000. Now you can also add some fluff. "I could tell by the way your muscles were tensing up, and because it was a 1968 quarter."

In battle you can do the same thing, only often a coin is replaces by people minds. "I know that Bob the general grew up on the Baltic region where they prefer the five point pike formation." (quick Wikipedia search) "Pike formations are best countered by a phalanx unit, so I will send the phalanxs against Bob". And as no surprise, Bob does use too many pike units in his army and loses the battle.

The idea is the same, I made a prediction bases on "smart people stuff", and the world acted as I predicted making my character smart.

posted about 5 years ago

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Andrey‭

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Often characters come up with meticulous, mind-bendingly brilliant plans which predict actions and reactions of other entities, or which somehow circumvent possible problems etc., and then they follow them through to the end to triumph or accomplish something unbelievable. I am unsure of how to write this kind of plot in a way that seems believable.

Rule #1 It's not stupid if it works.

Many of the most brilliant acts of generalship and/or tactics have been "stupid" on the face of things. Bobby Fisher's legendary queen sacrifice is a great example, although it's so well-known that it may no longer seem like such an audacious move. Also, see several of the Confederate campaigns in the American Civil War, where an outnumbered Southern army divided itself further (huge no-no in most tactical books) in order to achieve victory. As a final example, Julius Caesar's plea to the mutinous troops in 47 BC would have been pretty stupid if they'd just killed him.

As a general rule, all of these things are only considered brilliant because they did work. A player who sacrifices a queen and loses is a fool. A player who sacrifices a queen and wins is a genius. As the author, you have the power to ensure that their risky gambits work and that their tactics succeed, which will help solidify the idea that these are geniuses making great moves rather than idiots bungling things.

Rule #2 It's what we don't see that matters

If you're dealing with something rather opaque, like most mystery or battle-of-wits situations, then you get to rely heavily on what the characters do outside of your narration. !!! How did he bribe the arch-bishop??!?! How did he break that one henchman out of jail?!?!?! Doesn't matter, and you don't have to explain it.

Rule #3 Reputation is king

Boba Fett is lionized as one of the fiercest, toughest, most awesome characters in the original Star Wars trilogy. But he accomplishes very little on-screen, has his bounty handed to him on a silver platter, and gets eaten by a giant ant lion because a blinded guy accidentally bumps into him. What he does have going for him is a reputation. Everybody who encounters him expresses their belief in his competence and abilities.

It's relatively easy to build up minor villains and heroes, and then have them make the claims that you want the reader to believe instead of trying to directly make those claims as the author.

Summary Audience expectations and perceptions are what matter

If your audience thinks that your villain is a genius, then you can get away with almost anything. As Peter Benchley said (talking about Jaws):

I said “Steven, that is completely unbelievable. It can’t happen. A shark does not bite down on a SCUBA tank and explode like an oil refinery.” He said, “I don’t care.” He said, “If I have got them for two hours, they will believe whatever I do for the next three minutes because I’ve got them in my hands, and I want the audience on their feet screaming at the end, ‘Yes, yes! This is what should happen to this animal!’”… Reality may be great and truth may be wonderful, but none of it holds a candle to believability…. His ending brought people to their feet, screaming.

The hardest part is not to come up with a believable plan but to prepare your audience so that they want to believe it and can experience it with so that everything makes sense in their mind.

posted about 5 years ago

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Jeutnarg‭

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You have an advantage that people in the moment do not have: You have all the time in the world to think it through, and you can time-travel to the past to fix anything that goes wrong.

I wrote a battle scene recently that in the book took place in the space of an hour, and my expert soldier with decades of experience planned the battle in about sixty seconds, on the spot. It took me weeks to come up with that plan, drawing sketches, thinking of ways to let the severely injured guy contribute instead of being a liability, coming up with the enemy's best strategy I could think of. And the at least two weeks of work, puzzling and a dozen revisions of the plan before I even began writing, when condensed into half a page, resulted in a strategy my test readers found brilliant and entertaining, in keeping with the reputation of my character as a brilliant strategist.

But I took advantage of the fact I could go back in the book, and make changes to what had already transpired, for example to move my setting to something slightly more advantageous, e.g. near a natural barrier that wasn't there in my original draft, which my strategist knew the enemy would try to use to their advantage. (And knowing how they'd move when he gave them the opportunity let him turn that into a trap.)

You can do lots of things that way, go back and invent an emergency to get rid of a character, or add a new character, or change the setting. Try to not do this for convenience, happenstance works best when it works against the heroes. So, for example, I can give my strategist a reason to use subterfuge by going back and injuring some of his crew, now he can't use a head-on attack. I can go back in time and invent a reason they lose most of their weapons.

What you have, that your characters do not have, is all the time in the world to think about it, and the ability to tweak the setting, history, and setup in ways that seem innocuous, but are crucial to the strategy. So you might think,

"This doesn't make sense, they could just retreat. So what can I put behind them, so they can't retreat? A lake? Another army? Lions or cave bears? The enemy blew up their bridge? Ah, what if I put a river back there, two chapters ago ..."

By revising the past you have made it harder for them, and they can't just retreat, so it makes sense they have to go forward (or sideways).

It can take a lot of time, revisions, and puzzling to figure out a good strategy, but none of your sweat and headaches have to appear on the page. From the reader's perspective, the setting is what it is, they never saw anything else, and the strategy is the first thing that popped into your character's brilliant mind.

Other art can be like this too; in popular music many artists report hit songs that last 3 or 4 minutes took them over a year to write, to get the lyrics and rhythm and notes exactly right. An artist paints a painting in months, that you see and absorb in a few minutes. Even in food, some delicate new recipes take months to get right.

You have time.

posted about 5 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

All that has been said here about doing research, and about the advantage of the author's omnipotence, is valuable. But there is a more basic answer as well. Don't show how the sausage is made. Your hero is a tactical mastermind. Fine, have men drink a toast to his brilliance in the tavern after the battle. But don't explain the plan and its execution in excruciating detail. That's pretty boring anyway. Fiction is about moral choices. Battles, in fiction, are about courage, not tactics.

And consider how you know that real people have exceptional gifts. How do you know that Einstein or Jonas Salk or Bobby Fischer or Bach or Schrodinger or Socrates or Aquinas were geniuses? Unless you happen to be pretty highly gifted in their respective fields, you know it because you were told it was so and you believed it. How do we know the characters in your story are geniuses? Because other characters tell us so.

There is a genre is which, to an extent, the actual works of genius is presented, or, at least, it appears that a work of genius is being presented. But there is a reason that people make jokes about Sheerluck Holmes. Much of it is baffle gab. And what remains involves authors who have genuinely made themselves experts in a field, or were already before the decided to become authors. They don't have to fake it because they actually know their stuff. So if you want to be one of them, start studying.

posted almost 5 years ago

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4y ago

Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

Here's an element you want to consider: if I'm reading about a group of characters coming up with a plan, and then I read about them enacting that plan without a hitch, I've just read the same thing twice. That's boring.

You have two ways out of this problem, and both serve you for creating "genius" characters.

1. The plan is not discussed beforehand. First time I read about it is when it is enacted. In this case, I see the success of the plan. It appears a stroke of genius because it worked. I get a partial explanation of how it worked after the fact, when I'm already duly impressed. If there were any holes in the plan, I don't get to see them.
2. The plan is discussed beforehand. It appears smart because you don't leave any gaping holes - you have, as @Amadeus points out, an infinite time to come up with a plan. But then, because of some circumstance that could not have been foreseen, the plan fails, and your genius has to solve the new problem you created for them, looking even more impressive.

Note also that you are the creator not only of the solutions, but also of the problems. You needn't write your character into a corner and then find a genious way out of it. Instead, you can tailor the problem to the "genius" solution you want your character to find. Consider, for example, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. The solution is taking a 3D approach. Now let's create a set of problems to which this is the correct approach, and voila! Ender is a genious.

posted almost 5 years ago

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5y ago

Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3

One way to depict a brilliant military mind is to find a successful battle or campaign in history which starts from similar conditions to the type of starting conditions you want at the start of the battle or campaign in your story, and then more or less copy the historical battle or campaign.

But you change details to perhaps copy an event in Earth's recorded history into a space war, or a war in Earth's distant future or past, or on a another planet, or in some fantasy setting. And you change some details so that instead of maybe a few leaders have the good ideas that lead to victory, the protagonist thinks of all the good ideas himself. And possibly you might shorten the campaign or battle to omit as many of the boring parts as possible. And possibly you think of ways to increase the apparent odds against victory - while keeping those apparent odds irrelevant to the outcome - to make the eventual victory seem more impressive.

And the same thing goes for other types of strategic thinking. You can copy examples of brilliant political strategic thinking or brilliant financial strategic thinking from history, and have your brilliant characters behave like the most brilliant politicians or financiers in history.

posted about 5 years ago

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M. A. Golding‭

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As an author, you have a couple of superpowers which you can bestow upon your characters:

• Super perception. You know every detail in your story, including those a normal person wouldn't even notice. You can let your characters notice any small detail which will help them to accomplish their goals.
• Super memory. Any factoid in your world is either invented by you or something you can look up in a matter of hours. So you can have your characters recall any relevant information on the spot.
• Super people knowledge. You know when your characters are lying or bluffing or how they would behave in hypothetical situations. You can let your characters know that too. Call it intuition or knowing that person very well.
• Super thinking speed. When someone follows a plan and something goes wrong, they need to make up a new plan on the spot. Due to the time pressure and stressfulness of the situation, this often goes badly in the real world. But as an author you have as much time as you need to come up with a new plan which you can then hand to your character within seconds.
• Super luck. You can have events play out exactly the way which benefits your character most. You can then retroactively attribute this to the superior intellect and planning skill of your character. The main difference between a genius plan and a stupid plan is that the first one works and the latter one fails.

posted about 5 years ago

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Philipp‭

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Read. Watch. Take notes.

Read books, read newspapers, study history, watch movies and plays... and take notes.

You will find examples full of backstabbing, betrayal, dirty dealing, clever schemes, dastardly plots, diabolical designs, cunning cads, biting retorts, and witty dialogue.

And that's just high school... ( ~ ^)b --☆

The world is your library, all of time the stage performance for an audience of one... you.

Make use of those resources...

posted about 5 years ago

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nijineko‭

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