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Underground > Creation >

Characters with hidden knowledge and great minds

02:47 / 19.05.04

anyone here platyed much with characters above their own ability?

03:05 / 19.05.04

hokey doke... i was deleting this thread, and seem to have spilled the gut-bucket all over the operating theatre.
while i have asked for the other one to be deleted, i guess i may as well proceed with this one.

the basic gist of what i had decided not to post was a request for help with an idea i have been playing with. the idea involves a character of greater intellectual capacity and experience than myself. not only is the bloke supposed to be smart, but he has the kind of occult knowledge that makes one aroused just to imagine it can be known.

i was looking for advice on making a character believable when said character is able to out-think the likes of his creator.

i see how one could appear to be writing 'clever' in much the same way as westerns used to do american indian.

10:50 / 19.05.04

We can delete this one too if you want Toksik, but I think it's an interesting thing to discuss actually.

I guess partly the answer is that as you research what you want your character to know, you also learn, so in fact your knowledge grows with your character.

Alternatively, you carefully plan the basics of what you want your character to know/say (for example has a great knowledge of Norse Runes) and thenn ask someone who does have that knowledge to fill in the academic gaps in your creation. But that person would have to be very clear about what you were trying to achieve since you personally wouldn't know from reading it whether or not your character was coming across as you would wish.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:54 / 19.05.04

I actually think this is a fascinating question... and one I've wondered about myself in the past.

I can't remember who, but I read someone once saying that a great rule for writing science fiction was not to try to write dialogue for a species totally in advance of humanity, unless you are or have met one. Impractical at best.

At some point, you're always gonna have to wing it... massive intelligence in a character is not the only stumbling block of this kind. How DOES a serial killer feel when waking the next morning to a new corpse? (Although I'd hope stuff I wrote wasn't being read by serial kilers who'd email me and say "no, but it's not LIKE that"... that'd be a bit scary).

If you're writing something with any number of characters, at least some of them are gonna have knowledge/experiences/insights beyond those you've gained in your own life, unless you've had thus far an amazingly comprehensive life. Or can nick this stuff from friends.

Actually, I've just realised, I haven't offered any advice at all. BUT I have pondered my own thought processes on the same problem. And it's a tricky one.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:23 / 19.05.04

I guess partly the answer is that as you research what you want your character to know, you also learn, so in fact your knowledge grows with your character.

Alternatively, you carefully plan the basics of what you want your character to know/say (for example has a great knowledge of Norse Runes) and thenn ask someone who does have that knowledge to fill in the academic gaps in your creation. But that person would have to be very clear about what you were trying to achieve since you personally wouldn't know from reading it whether or not your character was coming across as you would wish.

Hmmm.. that's how to get information, but that's not the same as actually being more intelligent, is it? Isn't the problem that somebody with the intellectual capacity and knowledge toksik is describing is likely to *think* in a different way to toksik. Which might be minimised by also minimising inner voices, soliloquys, that sort of thing... If you are assuming a different type of education, it might be worth getting somebody to proofread speech.

"Clever" is very easy to get wrong - Flyboy's position on Fred in Angel is quite handy, where over time poor writing of Fred meant that, while she was frequently characterised as almost simple-minded in her everyday associations with others, the writers also assume that clever in one way means automatically clever in all other ways also - so, despite having literally lived in a cave for five years, Fred designs the Angel Investigations website...

12:46 / 19.05.04

Think "The Sphinx" from Mysterymen. You say something, then you say the opposite, and that's deep.
And bluff like a motherfucker. And in reverse order speak!
And there's always the H.P.Lovecraft copout- the unnameable, indescribable, unknowbable, unspeakable THINGS that defy explanation, exposition, or descriptive language of any kind, and whose names cannot be pronounced by the human tongue, and speaking of them will bring down a terrible doom upon us all, so you'd be better off staying in bed after all.

17:24 / 19.05.04

see, i can bluff and blag with the best of them... but thats just not enough.
haus, you've totally nailed what i am talking about. if i was trapped in a situation that seemed inescapable, i would probably die. i have the benefit of being able to think about the problem for ages and ages, but i am still stuck behind a wall of only slightly above average intelligence.

quick thinking is easy to fake. its like a computer game. you get to try and try and try again until everything is 100% perfect, while your rerader sees the action only once. its good thinking that is tough to cheat.

sherlock holmes works several moves ahead of the reader much of the time, but in ways that would not have necessarily become apparent to anyone else. in fact, much of the point is that no one else could make the connections and deductions he does.

conan doyle gets round that two ways. he has he benefit of knowing precisely who commited what, why, and how, and
he has holmes slow everything down to explain it to watson(ie the reader). i dont want to do the latter, as the guy is not the kinda guy who tells anyone anything unecessarily. i cant do the former, as he is not a detective and he is not unravelling those sorta puzzles.

shor of writing it and showing it to lex luthor for proof reading, i dont really know how to get round that.

19:38 / 19.05.04

quick thinking is easy to fake. its like a computer game. you get to try and try and try again until everything is 100% perfect, while your rerader sees the action only once. its good thinking that is tough to cheat.

this, whilst being a strurdy and generally useful petard, does have the ability to hoist the author when one misses something really obvious.

cue audience wondering why on earth sean connery needed to do all that work escaping from alcatraz when the door opens from the inside. and him an SAS geezer and everything.

22:27 / 19.05.04

I guess I thought maybe you were asking about how to portray a lot of specifically channelled intelligence in your character Toksik, sorry.

Haus, I don't see how anyone does this without research. People frequently write about characters with different knowledge bases than their own and I really think the only way to get it right is to research the subject and talk to people who do know about the subject in question. If you are talking about creating a character with an all round higher intelligence level than your own, then I don't see how it's possible to do this unless you're writing something where, as in the Conan Doyle/Holmes analogy, the author holds information that the reader is only fed in dribs and drabs.

I mean, how would you ever know if you were wrong until after you had written and publicly presented the thing?

Can I also add that I think anyone who asks as interesting a question as this, probably doesn't have an 'only slightly above average intelligence level', and is quite likely underestimating themself.

00:12 / 20.05.04

why, thank you.

i suppose its wisdom rather than knowledge or intelligence i need.
anyone can learn stuff, not everyone knows how to use it.

hm.

still struggling.

00:54 / 20.05.04

I don't know if this any help, but novelists sometimes talk about the experience of feeling their characters " dictate " their lines as they write. I don't have the exact quote here ( sorry ) but I remember Brett Easton Ellis saying in an interview that for a lot of American Psycho, there seemed to be this " crazy guy in the corner, " almost " telling him " what to put to next. William Burroughs and Philip K Dick ( I think, ) have also mentioned this phenomenon. As, more embarassingly perhaps, has Anne Rice. I'm not sure what you'd have to do to get yourself into this kind of state though, or even if it's advisable, but that might be one way round the problem. You could try doing a search on " automatic writing, " perhaps ? Or there's a thread in the Temple on shamanism as it relates to the theatre, I think, that might be useful.

00:59 / 20.05.04

Yeah Theater And Shamanism about halfway down.

12:08 / 26.05.04

Hmm, this reminds me of how Peter O'Donnell used to write his Modesty Blaise stories- mostly he'd create an inescapable trap for his heroes, then STRAIN his brain 'till he had a way out for them, they really were rotten spies- always getting captured and tortured and made to fight in gladiatorial death matches or hunted like animals or left in inescapable prisons or death traps, but man could they escape...
Eh, you could always study how the greats brought off their impossibly intelligent characters- Edgar Allen Poe and his Monsuir Dupin mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, mostly the Great Detectives spring to mind, but surely it's all a matter of research and obfuscation. Hey, did you know the doctor who provides the behavioural self-control techniques for the hero in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was based on F.M. Alexander, creator of the Alexander Technique, the Psychocybernetics-like aspects of which are featured in the book. So, you can disguise an existing brain as your character. Failing that, drop some Nootropics and let us know how it turns out!