The Frustrating Thing about Characters

The other day I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends (I also just had a dream about Captain America and still love the original Yu-Gi-Oh!  I'm proud of my nerd status).  It was the first time in a long time since I've played it, and in total it was only my third experience with it.  At one point in the game I said my character would tell a story while we journeyed to our next location, because my character likes telling stories and I thought it was something she would do to lighten the mood.  I didn't realize I would actually have to tell a story.  It makes sense, I guess.  But I had to come up with a story off the top of my head, and in the end it was super lame.  When I finished I thought, "If I were actually my character, I would have been able to tell a much better story."

That brings me to the focus of this blog post: in writing, your characters are only as smart, awesome, knowledgeable, etc. as you are.

I'm really good at coming up with impossibly hard situations.  The antagonist has all but won, the good guys are trapped or about to die, and it's all up to the main protagonist to come up with a brilliant plan to save everything.  Talk about a climax!  And then I realize that I have no idea how the main protagonist is going to get out of this one.  I stare at the screen, trying to think of a solution, but my bad guy is five steps ahead and there's really nothing to do.  Eventually, I'll re-write the scene so that something in the antagonist's preparations is flawed, or I'll write something absolutely ridiculous and unrealistic to save the day, or I'll go to a friend and ask them what I could do.  The last option usually works out the best.

But it's so frustrating to me that my character, who should be the greatest hero of the age, the brilliant mind who saves the day and ends up a legend, is only as smart as I am.  If I can't come up with a solution, they can't.  If I don't know the inner workings of the CIA, they don't.  If I don't understand what it's like to live in a third-world country, they don't.  That feels very restricting.

Obviously you can do some research to fix the knowledge problem, but that doesn't fix intellect and critical-thinking.  How do you create someone smarter or more talented than you?  Sometimes I wonder whether or not Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, is a genius like his main character, or if he just gathers enough information on a few subjects to fake his way through.  Maybe he has a brilliant friend whom he asks for help when he gets stuck.

And maybe that's the answer.  You have to ask for help.  Get a new brain to look at the problem and if their suggestions don't work, maybe something they say will spark another idea.

So, I guess that means your characters are only as smart as you and your connections combined.  Just make sure you mention those connections in an Acknowledgements page when the book gets published.