have a pet peeve.

I hate when novelists write about extraordinarily smart people when they don’t really know what it means to be smart. Most of these people write smart like it’s a list of accolades. Throw in a PhD, make it in a complicated field. Maybe add witticisms. Quotations from Plato. Public recognition. But being smart isn’t about what you have; it’s about how you see the world. Smart people figure things out. They don’t figure everything out; they don’t even always figure out most things. But on average, a smart person will figure out more things than a person who is not as intelligent. If it were not so, the person would not be smart.

And so I beg you. If you’re writing smart characters, don’t make them smart by giving them interests of smart people. Don’t make them smart by dint of quoting obscure texts. Don’t give them a first in mathematics. Not that they shouldn’t do any of these things, but none of that makes a character smart. It makes the character have characteristics of someone who may be smart.

If you’re writing smart characters, ask yourself: How would a smart character see the world? What would the smart character see that less intelligent characters would miss?
If your answer to that is “nothing”–if your smart character never acts smart, and only has the trappings of intelligence–you don’t have a smart character. You have a regular joe with a first in mathematics.

So is it possible to write a character smarter than yourself? Of course. It’s easy. Why? There’s two reasons. One, you know everything about your world. All you need to do is make sure that your smart character can figure out more about the world than someone less so (it’s fair, of course, for the smart character to misread things, too). It’s the figuring out bit that’s important–you already know the answers yourself. Make your smart character figure things out better, and you’re golden.

The second reason is that your smart character can figure out in three seconds what it takes you two weeks to conjure up. The insight that it took you three drafts and five critiques to see? Give that to your smart character, in the flash of a second. Do that enough times and the character will be smart.