How does one write a character smarter than oneself?
How does one write a "genius" character? I don't mean a scientific genius, or someone who is a prodigious talent in math or chess or something like that. I mean the following scenario (or an equivalent):
- Character G (for "genius") is a criminal mastermind who has just devised a brilliant scheme to make lots of money
- G is pursued by Inspector A (for "average"), an everyman detective who knows G is up to something and is itching to catch him in the act, even though he doesn't know what the plan is. In fact, A can't even imagine it because it takes special insight and/or knowledge to have thought of it.
It seems like brilliance of G's scheme (and of G himself) is necessarily limited by the ingenuity of the author. And if the author can't come up with a sufficiently ingenious plot for G to hatch, it's hard for the reader to believe that an ordinary person couldn't have thought of it ("Really? That's his plan? And Inspector A never saw it? How stupid is he?")
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As an example, Susan Elia MacNeal, the author of the Maggie Hope mysteries, didn't know anything about code-breaking when she started writing books about an American mathematician who ends up in WWII London and becomes a British spy. But she did have lots of friends at MIT, so she started asking them about cryptography. She used their help to make Maggie brilliant at seeing and cracking codes.
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The character has to tailor a solution to fit a given problem, but you are not so limited. You can come up with a problem to fit a clever solution.
Take some obscure thing you happen to know, that an everyman wouldn't be expected to know: say, that the Chinese for "I'm going to hit you with this giant phone" sounds very similar to a phrase meaning "Thank you coming to visit me." Now, imagine a situation where this could be used to pull off something seemingly impossible: say, verbally threatening Person A while Person B can hear, but without letting Person B know that anything worrisome is going on. Write G into this situation. It's not easy, but it's a lot easier than the reverse.
For bonus points, note that you now have G hatching a plan involving making a giant weapon that looks like a phone. If you come up with an additional problem facing G that can also be solved ingeniously using a phone-club, then G looks especially brilliant--he's elegantly solved two problems with the same ingenious device.
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Primarily, cheat by writing the story backwards. Start from the end revelation of the implicit story (the crime) and progress towards beginning, iteratively removing any simplicity.
Start with the outcome, the rather simple final set of events that is to be discovered. Then take it apart: tools, witnesses, methods, motives.
Take a look at each of them. Whenever you see something overly simple, replace it with something ambiguous, deceiving, non-obvious, or outright fake. Unlike the real wise guy, you don't have to limit yourself to things they can do. You can modify circumstances, personalities, environments to fit your convoluted needs.
Then, when you have the whole set of utterly corrupted clues, start writing the explicit story, what the readers will see. Distribute the clues throughout it, and then have the investigator come to the right conclusions, correctly recognize lies and deceits, and present the outcome as result of detailed analysis, a set of random pieces matching in the end, ingenious mind combining them, while in fact it was constructed from a kit of parts with a builder's manual you have created before starting on the explicit story, and only made the process seem unguided while you, the writer, were the guide.
(just to add: this is how math exercises are written. How do you get that complex equation to resolve to "2"? Start with "2", then keep multiplying by expressions that resolve to identity, add expressions that resolve to zero, square both sides, shift expressions between sides, divide by some red herring, and when your equation looks mangled enough, write it down as the subject of the exercise.)
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6678. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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