Does your character have to be as smart as your reader?

Of course not, you'd say. And you'd be right...but. That's the point of this article.

Let's start with the question of what it means for a character to be "smart." I usually think of different kinds of character attributes as contributing to the impression of smartness. The ability to use logic and reason based on experience is one of those. The ability to reflect on and evaluate one's own actions. The ability to communicate effectively can also be interpreted as an indicator of intellect, though it isn't a particularly reliable one.

What the character needs to do intellectually depends on what the story involves. If the character is Sherlock Holmes, he needs to be pretty darned intellectual (along with a host of other things, as watchers of "Sherlock" will testify). If she's out there trying to solve a mystery, she should have the ability to do that, because it will look awfully strange if the protagonist isn't the one to resolve the main conflict. If, as in my stories, she's trying to solve a linguistic mystery, she needs not only mental facility but an expertise in linguistics. There is an endless list of the possible specialties that characters need in order to solve some of those sf puzzles (I've seen chemists, engineers, etc.).

If, by contrast, you're writing something about someone with a divergent mode of thinking - such as the autistic protagonist of The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time - you'll have to gauge carefully how you portray the special characteristics of the person's thinking and then the intellect. They may or may not be related. I struggle sometimes in writing my antagonist Nekantor because he has OCD and is very repetitive - but is also extremely smart, so I have to find a balance in his narrative that makes him plausibly obsessive and plausibly intelligent at the same time.

All right, so let's go a bit further with this. You would put a lot of effort into making sure that you don't make physical or temporal inconsistencies in your story - it's important also to maintain consistency in the intellect of your characters. If a character can use logic to solve a complex problem in one situation, she's very likely to be able to do it in another situation as well. Make sure you don't have your character suddenly lose his mind and behave ridiculously. Sure, there are external influences that can change a character's ability to reason through things (like being in a panic or hurry situation, emotionally distracted, etc.). Just make sure that change is appropriate to the nature of the distractions.

So what do I mean by "does your character have to be as smart as your reader"?

This is a funny one, but to some extent a character needs to share some of the reader's instincts for how stories work.

Particularly if the character is someone who generally comes across as having a strong intellect, or who is having to use reasoning to get through the plot, you don't want (or at least, I don't want) him/her suddenly to catch a case of horror movie stupidity: "Here we are in grave danger from an unknown killing force that seems to come from nowhere but which I've been carefully using evidence to track down - let's split up."

Recently I put down a book because of a different kind of inconsistency. The character I was reading had been spending a lot of time thinking through the motivations of one of his companions, trying to figure out how the guy was thinking, because they were very different types of people - and then suddenly he completely stopped reasoning and decided to take his companion's words at face value (and think worse of him) in a scene where the companion was almost certain to be lying. This is where the reader comes in. Not only was it inconsistent, but I knew the guy had to be lying, and it didn't make sense for the protagonist to think he wasn't. Instead, it gave me the impression (one the author surely didn't intend) that the story was trying to manipulate me emotionally.

In fact, I have run into a very similar situation recently in my own work - where my protagonist has to share some of my own, and my reader's, instinct for where stories usually go. I had my protagonist pursuing someone out toward a waterfall, having some action and argument ensue, and then having the fugitive jump into the waterfall. My critique partner Doug Sharp (yes, he's very sharp) called me on this. He knew the guy was going to jump in the waterfall as soon as he knew that was where they were going, and he was shocked that my protagonist didn't also figure this out.

Oops on me.

So now I'm going to make sure that my protagonist expects that the fugitive will jump into the waterfall, just the way my reader did - and then, I won't have him do it (just to shake things up). After that happened, I caught myself just today realizing I was about to do it again. The previous linguist died mysteriously. Was it an accident? Or was it the evil corporate guys? Well, if you're a reader, it's unlikely to be the former. And if it can't be the latter, then my characters have to entertain the possibility that the natives did it. Because that's the next option for a reader to consider, and not having my protagonist consider it would make him appear stupid.

So while your character doesn't have to be "smart" necessarily, nor should he or she be obliged somehow to match your reader (which would be tough, since you don't know who's going to read it anyway) - it's still good to think through this kind of "knowledge of story/cliché" instinct and make sure your characters aren't dropping the ball at critical moments... or your reader might just drop the book.

And we can't have that!

Measures of Intelligence

The other day I went to the Ardenwood Historic Farm, which isn't far from our house. It was peak season there, with a corn maze and pumpkin patch and lots of great animals at the farm. One of the key attractions was a pair of pigs - huge creatures, which we were told had only been born this spring. The friendly farm volunteer asked us if the pigs looked intelligent. Some folks, mostly kids, said no. Some sagely nodded their heads, having been told previously that pigs were quite intelligent. Then the volunteer explained to us that one of the big signs of porcine intelligence was this: they might spend a lot of time lolling around and digging their heads and bodies in muck, but they keep the location where they defecate constant, separated from the location where they sleep, and the location where they eat. Other animals at the farm don't do this.

It got me to thinking. What are the cues we use to measure intelligence?

This is a question that is quite relevant to science fiction, because in the science fictional arena, you quite often find situations where one alien or another is casting aspersions on another species' intelligence (or possibly admiring it). But it's not just for alien scenarios. When we think to portray a character to our readers - just generally - we need to make sure their impressions of that character's intelligence agree with our own, and it's useful to think about what kind of cues to use.

We might be able to run a dog, or an alien, through a maze, but that's a bit less plausible for humans.

A lot of the way we assess intelligence comes down to behavior. A creature or person who is keenly attentive to his surroundings, and purposeful in his movements, can easily come across as more intelligent than one who is not. Restraint and good manners are often taken as a sign of intelligence. Someone can show intelligence in the way she organizes her belongings or the space she occupies. In a conversation between speaking entities (not necessarily human!) a shorter lag time before beginning a response can indicate intelligence. People who speak faster can often be seen as more intelligent - and I've even seen this measure used (naively) to cast aspersions on speakers of dialects that have a slower rate of speech. Another sign of intelligence in speech is lack of redundancy - either the lack of reiteration in one's own speech, or the ability to build on another person's contribution to a conversation rather than simply recasting it.

These measures can be useful - and the expectations associated with them can be used to the writer's advantage in description and dialog. However, they are heavily influenced by culture and context, and should be considered highly fallible.

A person isn't unintelligent if she speaks with a slow dialect. Leaving a pause before you respond to what someone says could be interpreted as a lack of alacrity - or as thoughtful pondering of a response. Good manners are just that - good manners. And we know that all sorts of people get crazy once in a while!

Misunderstandings in this arena can provide great opportunities for stories. In the story I'm currently working on, the group of aliens has an unusual criterion for "higher intelligence" that humans don't happen to share. The pigs at Ardenwood farm are a great example of how a behavior that might seem senseless to us - digging around in mud with one's nose - can make perfect sense to another species and have nothing at all to do with that species' level of intelligence.

It's something to think about.

After reading through the links that Mike Flynn volunteered in my comments section below, I heartily recommend his taxonomy of aliens, which can be found here.