Discussion A protagonist's intelligence is limited to that of the author?

Food for thought- even if a writer wishes to write a clever character he/she is limited by their own intellect before resorting to deus ex machina or ending up with a Gary/Mary sue.

Your opinions pls

 

Not really. You don't need to be top world genius to write about the top world genius protagonist. It's about how you make the MC felt smart to the readers.

Although the quality of the story is tied to the Author's skill and intellect, it's not the sole deciding factor.

 

*agrees* yeah.. its mostly correct... how can they write something they dont really know... even if they look it up on the internet, its not like they can fully understand some intellectual things..
well, just mostly coz sometimes authors based their characters on real people too no? and if by some lucky coincidence, the referrence of that smart mc is his/her friend, then i think there's a chance for the author to not be limited by his/her own intellect...

 

Semi-true.
It depends ob the type of intelligence that the author wants to show.
Split second decisions, intuitivel knowing something or quick wit are easier to do than some scheming, strategic thing.
Simply because rhe author has longer to think about it than character, so as long as they put the thought in, they can come up with something.
But strategy and schemes directly rely on the authors ideas no matter what

 

agreed ... even in acting it's easier to play stupid then to play highly smart, unless you aren't playing

 

Well the closest thing to intelligence is the appearances of it.

That's why authors usually base their writings on something that already happened and retell the story in an abstract way. Like how the yellow brick road was based on politics.

Protagonist intelligence is not the only parameter that would define how smart a novel is....

 

An argument can be made that the author can bypass the intelligence needed to make intricate schemes if they have read enough stories. Just find schemes that were not simple but also not convoluted in the stories they read and alter them enough to fit their story. or they can simply use them as something to base off of. neither choice needs high intelligence just enough creativity to make it work.

 

When you want to plant a beautiful red oak, you need to consider the forest around it, the land surrounding it, the trial and tribulation it will face to become a giant red oak and the view the people will see it from. The tree cannot support itself with its own vanity forever, ya know.

tldr; A beautiful mind - watch it if you want an example.

 

I agree that knowledge is also a high factor in this, but if you write a highly scheme-heavy story, you need to understand all of the POV's and put logical reasoning behind it, even if its not shown.
While copying/adapting something can be a huge crutch, if done wrongly it would leave holes - sometimes glaringly obvious - so simply doing something lile that willy-nilly wont achive much

 

Eh, I disagree, but there's certainly a bottleneck there. Even in something very straight forward like tactics, it's much easier to write about than to actually do. In real life, a person has to look at all the variables and make the best possible plan according to them. In writing, an author can use any old plan and then develop the setting to make it work.

It's more about proper use of foreshadowing, and not making the answer blindingly obvious to the reader while the protagonist still struggles to figure it out.

 

invisible dragon

 

Depends, really. I mean an author can take days to come up with a setting, a scheme and the situation and the character will act smart for a chapter. An author can dig up all kinds of stuff on the net so not really

 

have u ever tried playing chess with yourself?

you're just going to come up with the same shit moves no matter what or how you play.

an author trying to write about schemes and conspiracies is like that

no matter how much you research or write, unless you plagarize,

you're just not going to come up with anything good if you cant think of anything good

 

this is why for me it's always a red flag when a character on royalroad (for example) is supposed to be a super genius. As a beginning author it's not a good idea to write a character as a genius because suddenly you're not allowed to make dumb mistakes as that character

 

A novel with a believable smart character needs other believable smart characters which ultimately fail to reach his level of competence. Writing multiple such characters is easy enough if they are as smart as you are. But once they surpass your own intellect it gets very time consuming. This is why Webnovels in general but especially CNs lack these characters so much. The creators simply lack the time to put in this extra effort.

Different kinds of intelligence also vary in difficulty to imitate. And it might be that a person is just too stupid to even imagine how a truly smart character thinks. It gets even worse if minds are truly alien, such as immortal characters in a high fantasy setting. For every decision one of these guys makes each of us could write a chapter of ATG or MGA.

 

Mentioning "intelligence" is a wide subject with countless personal definitions. Do not confund intelligence with wisdom as knowing things doesn't mean you can make the best use of it.

To me, an intelligent character is a character that can plan a few steps ahead and predict event/action/behaviour before they happen.
Writing about this as an author is the same as chess. You need to figure out beforehand what's going to happen, and dissimulate through the stories clues about it without revealing it outright so as to preserve the element of surprise.

In the harry potter series, Dumbledore plan to kill Voldemort, he started scheming ever since receiving the prophecy of Harry's fate. But it was only a prophecy, a possible future, so it was up to him (or so he thought) to put the odds in his favor by using his wits and manipulation to reach the desired goal.
In this novel, Dumbledore is smart, not because he has knowledge, has titles or his job position, but because he can predict things and influence the flow of events to his advantage. A successful chess player.

Note that things would have been completely different if the author shed light on Dumbledore plan in the first book, or divulged the prophecy at the beginning of the story. It's because there were some clues shrouded in darkness that we only figured the truth at the end of the novel, only because we understood and saw how the events unfolded into this final confrontation, did we realise that Dumbledore was intelligent for bringing everything into place and helping Harry play his part.

So, is J. K. Rowling smarter than Dumbledore for creating his character. Obviously no, since intelligence depends on the context. If J. K. Rowling had to face a real life circumstance and devise a strategy, she wouldn't be able to take out such a long term scheme from her hat.
It is because she created the world and had many months to think of the plot that it ended with such an intelligent character.
If J. K. Rowling was in Dumbledore's shoes or any other character without knowledge of how the events would unfold, she would be as clueless as any of us, it would take great courage, wisdom and patience to replicate the action of her characters. (which doesn't mean she share these traits)

 

i think this is a problem that comes from how the author design these "intelligent" moments the MC may have, generally there are 2 ways:

top to bottom: and it's when the author start from the wanted result and back track to the original situation which can be useful but most of the time it's done badly as in the logic not holding up from the point of view of someone reading it from bottom to top or that the complexity of the design demand the introduction of new tools that were not foretold in the story before (aka ass-pull).

bottom to top: this is the most organic method out of the two and it usually lead to better internal logic albeit less complexm one just need to be careful of making wrong deductions that should be impossible from the amount of info the read has (looking at you sherlock holmes and detective conan) and the amount of obscurity the given clue should have (if the clue need the reader to piece the first letter from every third paragraph in every 7th page of the book then you failed).

hope this was helpful for you guys.

 

jk rowling is actually a very smart woman...
she even taught in one of the better university in the UK for a bit before harry potter was successful...

isn't this because jk rowling is the author =x

but yea, it isn't hard to make a character seem prophetic, esp when he's already in a power position, doesn't not have any big role to play in the story and only appears at the end...

anyway i wouldn't be in disbelief if she said she had an entire team or editors and writers behind her

 

That’s why very few fiction novels can have characters considered uniquely intelligent or have unique strategies in the sense that “Oh I never saw that coming from the mc”. Usually I can guess almost every scenario for what the mc will do next.