We want heroes to be smart, but we authors may not be smart. This is a problem. Also, other characters in the story might be smart, so why haven’t they done whatever smart thing was required before now? These are the problems we encounter when our characters craft clever solutions. This week, we’re talking about how to surmount those problems and how to make it look like you knew what you were doing the whole time.

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music] 

Oren:  Hey, Oren from the future here. In this episode, I refer to typhoid when I should have been saying cholera, so just keep that in mind. 

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris. 

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: I know I’m supposed to give listeners clever tips, but that’s hard. So how about I just talk about how they should “shift the polarity” of every scene and then “reconfigure the narrative matrix?”

Oren: That sounds pretty clever. But I think we should go the opposite direction and say something that sounds kind of silly, that people assume we must mean something clever. Like I was to call my writing advice on pacing, “Bishop in the pantry.” What does that mean? That means nothing.

Chris: Hey, it’s snazzy and memorable. It’s got that buzz to it. 

Oren: It’s just meaningless.

Chris: [Chuckles] So when people do technobabble, I actually call that a “clever ex machina.” Because it’s basically a dressed up deus ex machina. If the audience can’t follow the logic, it’s like you made random stuff up. 

Oren: You just said words. You could just replace them with “womp womp” sounds, and it would be dramatically the same thing.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: And this is mostly a sci-fi problem, but you get it in fantasy too. 

Chris: No, it definitely happens in lots of fantasy where the magic system hasn’t actually been communicated or figured out, but the characters still solve problems with magic. So it’s like, “Okay, well I’ll just solve this with magic again.” And sometimes it sounds very technical.

Oren: If you say so, I guess I gotta take your word for it. 

Chris: So talking about creating clever solutions, which can be tricky. ‘Cause that’s why they’re clever. Obviously they won’t feel clever unless they meet a certain benchmark. 

Oren: And I’m not clever, so that’s a problem. I gotta figure out a way to make this character smarter than me. How do I do it? Well, the trick is that I have infinite time to come up with ideas. 

Chris: I don’t know Oren, I think your podcast listeners would say something other than “you’re not clever,” I think. 

Oren: Have you met our podcast listeners? They get harsh. [Laughs]

Chris: Wait, what are you, what does that mean? [Laughs] You certainly sound clever on the podcast is what I’m saying. I don’t know what you were saying. [Chuckles]

Oren: You’re confusing sarcasm with cleverness. [Chuckles] The thing to think about here, is it’s interesting that it is easier to come up with split-second clever ideas, than it is to come up with clever ideas to problems that take longer to solve.

And the reason for that is that you, as the author, have plenty of time. And so if it’s a problem where being clever is limited to a few seconds, you can spend several minutes thinking about it. But if it’s something that people have spent their lifetimes trying to figure out, it’s like, well, how much time do you got?

Chris: There are tricks though. We will talk about those tricks. So when do you need clever solutions? Because just about everybody does at some point. For one thing, you gotta have your turning points. And you want them to be satisfying. And you should not just use the same type of turning point all the time. That’s gonna get really old. 

So sooner or later you’re gonna wanna have some clever turning points in there, where your character does a clever thing in order to solve a problem. And it can just be a small problem, in which case they only need to be a little clever. But you’re gonna wanna have that in the mix. Otherwise things are gonna get repetitive. 

And the other reason is because you want to make characters who are supposed to be clever, actually feel clever. Which brings me to my complaints about Fourth Wing. 

Oren: [Laughs] Just that?

Chris: Our listeners might have noticed I am more favorable to Fourth Wing than Oren is.

Oren: Yeah, well.

Chris: Well, we have slightly divergent opinions on Fourth Wing. And, by no means a perfect book, but I think it’s still doing a lot right. But one thing that did continually bother me is that Violet is supposed to be smart and clever, but it’s all hand-waved so it doesn’t feel real.

Like preexisting knowledge, for instance. It does not really feel the same as a character coming up with clever ideas to solve problems. So for instance, Violet, the idea here is that she’s been forced to go to “Ruthless Dragon College” that kills its students for no reason. And she’s not prepared for the life-or-death fights that she has to do against other students.

So because she’s clever, she just already knows how to make poison. And we don’t really have to see her do anything clever to make the poison. She just already knows. So that’s basically hand-waved. But then there is one thing that would’ve been clever, which is figuring out a pattern so she knows who she’s gonna fight next.

Because these things are supposed to look random, but they’ve actually been prearranged. And she could notice, by observing. And this is how a lot of clever characters act, half of it is about their observation. Just like Sherlock with the idea that we get these little clues. A lot of times that’s what it boils down to. She could notice patterns and realize, “Oh, this is not random. This has been prearranged, and here’s how I calculate who’s gonna fight.” And that would make her feel clever. But instead, she just gets this diary that belonged to her brother that just tells her. 

So the one part–and I think it was–for Yarros, I think it was a way that she wanted to bring the brother into the story and she was looking for a way to do that. But this was a place where Violet really could have used that. So that she actually felt clever, like she was supposed to be. 

If you just have a character use their book smarts all the time, that’s preexisting knowledge and we don’t actually have to see them be clever on the fly. It’s that whole making things understandable that we talked about with the technobabble. The problem with the technobabble is the audience can’t follow that, so you’re just making random stuff up. 

Oren: Generally speaking, just having prior knowledge does not make a character seem clever. It’s usually, what makes them clever is how they can apply their knowledge. If you need to fix a car, and they just know how to do it because they read that in a book once, that’s fine. It seems capable, but it’s not gonna make them seem clever. 

Chris: If we saw Violet making a poison and she had to do something clever, let’s say she was missing one ingredient. And then she had to do some clever problem solving to find a new replacement for that ingredient. That could qualify. But when she’s already made it and we don’t see the process, it’s basically the same thing as technobabble because all the parts of it that required her to actually be clever have happened offscreen, basically. 

Oren: There’s another interesting scenario that comes up a lot for me, which is having characters figure things out from clues. And I have two funny examples from the same book that I read recently. Ninth House by I think, Leigh Bardugo. It might be Lee Bardugo. I’m not positive about that. So we’ve got two back-to-back examples of characters figuring things out from clues. The same character, actually. Figuring things out from clues.

In one case, making the most wild leap in logic. And in the other, taking forever to figure out something that was very obvious. So in the first one, we’ve got our character, his name is Darlington. He’s talking to another character about this time when she had been found at a scene where a bunch of people had died, and she mentions that her friend was there and had also died, and that her friend was left-handed.

And Darlington knows that she can see ghosts and somehow he’s like, “Oh, hey, but I heard the killer was left-handed. Therefore, you must have been possessed by the ghost and gotten superpowers and used that to kill all the guys!” And it’s like, what are you talking about? None of that has been introduced. He somehow made that connection from hearing that the friend was left-handed. The most wild supposition I’ve ever seen. 

And at first I thought it was because we had already found out that this was something that had happened and the author was just rushing us through the characters catching up. But no, this is the first time. This is how we learn not only that this is what happened, but that she has the ability to absorb ghosts and get superpowers. It was such a wild way to find that out. 

And then later–I actually made a mistake. It’s not the same character. This is now Alex we’re talking about. Alex is trying to figure out why a ghost killed his wife. Or if he killed his wife or someone else did it. And she gets hit by a magical backlash where she sees visions of the ghost, when he was alive, being possessed by another spirit and shooting his wife. And she’s like, “Huh, I wonder what that could mean?”

And then she spends several pages working up to, “I bet the ghost who possessed him made him do it”. I guess. Sure. I’m glad you got there eventually. 

Chris: It’s so hard to judge. It is really tedious when you see something obvious from clues. And it takes forever for our character to figure it out. But to be fair, readers do tend to figure things out at very different rates. 

Oren: That’s true. 

Chris: So sometimes that is hard to account for, but it does feel like we could have gone a little faster. That’s why I’m usually in support of giving a last important clue before the character figures it out. You give one clue at a time. They do what thinking and processing they can. And then we deliver the very last clue right before they figure it out. So there’s no long delay where you’re waiting for the character to catch up to where the readers are.

Oren: That’s usually the way to go. And that’s I think, what was supposed to happen in the first example. Hearing that the dead friend was left-handed, is supposed to put all the pieces together, but there weren’t any other pieces. It was just finding–and I legitimately don’t know if Darlington knew that absorbing ghosts could give you super strength, if he knew that was a power that existed. Or if he also invented the possibility of that for this reveal. The book’s very unclear about that. 

Chris: Hmm. That’s a question like, “Was this discovery writing?” We are always guessing whether authors were discovering writing something and making it up as they go, which is actually surprisingly hard to tell. Because a lot of authors who planned, if they did something that’s funny. It could be they didn’t notice that part. They didn’t notice it was funny. The mistakes can look very much like ad-libbing. 

Oren: And I think what’s going on here is that the reason why this is so weird is that it’s part of a meta-mystery. ‘Cause Alex is actually our POV character, not Darlington. And so Alex has been hiding all this information from us. And I think that we were supposed to be shocked when Darlington figured this out about Alex. And if there had been more information, we probably would’ve figured it out earlier.

Chris: Oh okay, yep.

Oren: Because it’s not really that shocking because Alex is established to be a stone-cold killer by then. So the idea that she killed a bunch of people we know she hated, is not super surprising. The only reason it’s a surprise is that the book had not given us any hint that this was even possible.

So I think that’s the problem there, is that there’s supposed to be a surprise, but the only way it can be a surprise is if we get no clues at all. Because otherwise we’d be like, “Yeah, I guess she killed them. ‘Cause she seems like she would do that.” 

Chris: Sometimes those reveals just aren’t worth it, folks. So let’s say you need a turning point for a smaller conflict. It’s an argument, it’s a fight and it could be important or exciting, but it’s not one of the most pivotal scenes in the book. One of the most exciting ones. Usually for those, if you want a clever solution, all you really need is a single observation and then a strategy tailored towards it that happens during the conflict. 

Like, “Oh, my opponent is favoring one side, so I’ll strike there.” Or, “This person is arrogant, so let’s fan their ego and make them overconfident.” Or, “Hey, this person doesn’t seem to wanna hurt me. Let’s negotiate instead.” 

And that one, they come off as clever enough. They’re not gonna blow the audience away, but they’re satisfying enough for your average conflict that you just need a quick solution to. So if you do something like that, one observation, the character… And it doesn’t have to be something they made in the moment. It could be something they made earlier, but then they think about it again during the conflict and be like, “Hey, I was told this about this person, so that means I should do this.” And that’s really all it takes. “This person hates me. Let’s try reverse psychology.” Something like that.

So those types of clever solutions aren’t generally too difficult and an average turning point there is usually quite doable. The most difficult ones are society-wide solutions. 

Oren: Or some kind of bigger scale problem. In Deep Space Nine, how do we get the Romulins to help us fight the war? ‘Cause clearly lots of people have been thinking about that. So if it was easy to do, then someone would have done it by now. And it’s hard to come up with, “Okay, what can our main characters do that other people would not have thought of?” And usually the most reliable way to make this happen is, you create a combination of special circumstances and new expertise. Sometimes you only need one or the other, but often both. 

So in this instance, in Deep Space Nine, we have special circumstances which are that things start to go really badly in the war. And this makes Sisko decide that he’s actually willing to engage in some shady tactics that he wasn’t before. He is willing to trust Garak who is a spy master. And let Garak do some stuff. And also, Sisko’s the only one who has access to Garak, ’cause Garak is undercover on his space station. So nobody else had this option to begin with. 

And this helps explain–Garak helps come up with this clever plan, which of course has a secret double extra plan inside of it ’cause that’s what Garak’s like. But you’re not left asking, “Well why didn’t someone else at Star Fleet do this?” Well, they didn’t have the option to, and Sisko wasn’t willing to do it until just now. 

Chris: You have to remember that everybody’s clever. And so the more people who would want this solution and have time to make the solution, the more unrealistic it is for the protagonist to be the only one who’s thought of it. And I would also say then, a lot of these situations, cultural stigma only goes so far. So if there’s a lot of money on the line, if there’s lives on the line, enough people are gonna overlook some kind of cultural taboo to doing something. Because everybody’s gonna really want a solution to this. 

Oren: And if they’re not, you are probably gonna want a stronger explanation for that. If you have a setting where there is some kind of vested interest in not solving the problem. That’s totally doable. You just need to show that more than like, “Oh, well in our society, we look down on people who solve this particular problem.” That’s probably not strong enough. 

Chris: You need like, “These people are profiting by this problem not being solved. And so therefore they’re using their power and money to take steps to prevent anyone from solving it.” 

Oren: And you could combine that with social stigma. That’s also possible.

Chris: Social stigma can help a little bit. It’s just not enough by itself. And I’ve seen a lot of stories that try to, “Oh, well nobody does this ’cause it’s not tradition.” Okay, but that only goes so far. 

Oren: And to use a real-life example, we have the story of John Snow, not from Game of Thrones. Real guy John Snow from the 1800s, and he did a lot of pioneering work figuring out the way typhoid spreads. I’m pretty sure it’s typhoid. I will add in the show notes if I’m wrong about that. I believe it’s typhoid. And he figured out that it was spreading through contaminated water sources. And he was on the ground figuring this stuff out.

The sort of high-tension, tangible medical drama you could tell a story about. And so the question you’d have to ask is, “Why did nobody else ever think of this? What made John Snow the first person?” And well, first of all, he probably wasn’t the first person, but he’s had a unique situation where he both has the knowledge, because medical technology and knowledge is advancing very fast in this time period. 

So he has access to knowledge most people don’t have, and he is also kind of an outsider. He’s not part of the same group of doctors who have been looking into this problem before. And then finally, once you have those things together, it makes sense that he’s able to figure something out that previously people had not figured out.

Chris: So if you come up with a way that things have changed recently that has created a new opportunity, that really helps. So we’re not on an infinite timeline where for hundreds of years people could have figured this out. No. It’s only the last five years. And so then your protagonist could just be the first person. That’s really useful. 

Any special abilities or skills or knowledge that are very specific to your protagonist. It was helpful that John Snow wasn’t a doctor, and you’d wanna specify why. And if your character has a special magic power, again, the magic power by itself is not clever. But your character can use their magic powers in clever ways that other people can’t. ‘Cause they don’t have that power. 

Oren: It would be a really unsatisfying story if John Snow just came outta medical school and was like, “Oh yeah, typhoid is spread through water supply. I learned that in medical school. We should fix this problem.” It wasn’t that simple. He did learn about waterborne illnesses in medical school, I believe. There was still a lot of mystery around exactly how typhoid spread. There were competing theories and the people who believed in the miasma theory, they had some reason to think of that. There are diseases that spread through the air, just not this one. 

Chris: So an example in Way of Kings. I recently went through Kaladin’s viewpoint. And Kaladin comes up with all of these solutions. Again, in this story, what’s going on is he is part of a bridge crew and they’re basically battle fodder. And their role is to carry these transportable bridges because this is a setting that has all of these chasms that the army has to cross.

And so they carry the bridge and put it down over a chasm so that then the soldiers can cross and then they pick it up and carry it to the next one. And the idea is that they’re completely disposable and they die really quickly. And some of the things that Sanderson comes up with for Kaladin to solve these problems, with Kaladin trying to keep his bridge crew alive are, pushing it.

For instance, he taunts the enemy by desecrating the bodies of their fellows. ‘Cause we’re like, “Oh, these people, they cannot stand it when anybody moves the dead bodies of their fellows. And they get so angry, that they attack whoever does it and that provides a distraction that then makes it so they stop attacking the bridge crew.”

But if this was the case, then their enemies would’ve used that against them long before. Because they’ve been fighting for years at this point. Their enemies would have a really high incentive to find novel ways of messing with them. So this is not a thing. They would have to get over it. [Chuckles]

Oren: Especially, and we see the same thing happen in a few other places. The Parshendi are the non-humans they’re fighting. And they have this problem where they always shoot at the bridge crew people instead of at the soldiers. And this tactic is established to not work, because the human lords just send in more slaves to carry the bridges and they apparently have an infinite number of those. 

And so the Parshendi are wasting their arrows instead of shooting at the soldiers that would actually do some good. And I can believe that this would work for the first few times. But after years? No, they would’ve figured out that shooting at the bridges is pointless. 

Chris: And beyond the fact that they can always replace the bridge crews. I think the bigger issue is they always make sure to bring enough bridges and bridge crews, that they still never hold the army back. Because they’re prepared to lose a whole bunch of them. And supposedly the bridge crews are distracting the Parshendi. And after a while the Parshendi would notice that shooting at these bridge crews never really results in tactical gains.

They never actually stop the army from crossing, which is the purpose of the bridge crews. So why keep attacking the bridge crews if that never actually hinders their enemy in any way? They would learn. People would learn and adjust. But Kaladin does have some special powers that can be leveraged in this situation that kind of keep him safe. And one thing I would’ve really loved to have seen more, that would’ve been a great way to sort of unlock new, clever solutions and make it realistic that only Kaladin had done these things is, we’ve kind of established that these bridge crews have a very short lifespan because they’re battle fodder. And so usually everyone’s dead in two weeks or something like that. 

And just the difference it makes to have one person who can carry knowledge and experience forward is huge. If you have any organization that has a turnover rate of two weeks, everybody’s permanently inexperienced. And can’t learn and adjust. So even having one person who survives, that unlocks all sorts of solutions that come with having more than two weeks of experience. So that isn’t actually used as much. Kaladin comes up with a bunch of solutions, but it’s always attributed to the fact that he has “battle experience” and he’s clever, for the most part. When just the fact that he’s around and is surviving would be a really big deal. 

Oren: Well, Kaladin has all the skills. He’s very good at many things. 

Chris: Yes, he’s a very candied character. 

Oren: So scaling it back down a little bit, one thing that I have encountered a number of times is the “clever solution.” Or at least a solution that is portrayed as clever, but there are no real limits on what the character can do, so it doesn’t seem clever. 

One really blatant example was from The Book of Doors, which I read recently. Where by the end, the main characters essentially have unlimited time travel. And it’s technically closed-loop time travel, so they can’t change anything that’s happened in the past. Although they don’t actually know that that’s the case, they just sort of assume it is. They never try anything. But that’s a different argument. So they can’t change anything, but they can set up infinity traps, basically. It’s like someone was playing Scooby-Doo, but seriously. They know where the bad guy’s gonna be and they know when, so they can set up as many contingencies as they want because they have– 

Chris: Okay, unlike in Scooby-Doo when they somehow have foreknowledge of exactly where the antagonist is gonna step, so they can have a trap fall in that specific location. 

Oren: Yeah exactly. It’s like that and it’s just nothing. I guess you had infinite time to come up with something. But also your solution doesn’t even have to be that good because you can create as many of them as you want since you have unlimited time travel.

Chris: Sounds like we need some urgency. 

Oren: They do need some. They can even do the causality fake-out thing that I described, where they can actually change things as long as they can make it look like the original thing happened, and that works too. It’s like, all right. Sure. I bet you that’s very smart. You must feel very good about yourselves. 

Chris: Having a story where you have a group of people who can go back in time to wherever they want repeatedly, it’s just not very viable. It’s not a good idea. 

Oren: I would recommend you not do that. 

Chris: Don’t do it. Instead, you can have it so they can’t control where they go, so they’re never prepared for where they end up. That works fine. Or they can go back just once and kind of learn how it works as they go, that works.

Oren: If they have one trip back that could work. They could set something clever up. But when it’s like, “Oh, we have as many trips back as we need.” It’s like, well, there you go I guess.

Chris: That’s not really clever anymore because the whole thing has been made too easy. 

Oren: Or sometimes you have a situation where the creators, the storyteller, has introduced something into the story that’s too world-breaking, and so they have to figure out a way for characters to counter it. But, that sounds hard. So instead of coming up with cool ways to counter metalbending in Korra, we’ll just make everything out of platinum. And now metalbending doesn’t work anymore. [Laughs]

Chris: [Chuckles]

Oren: I don’t know guys, why did you make metalbending a widespread technique? I sort of assumed only a few people could learn it. But no, I guess not. I guess anyone can learn it. So now we have to nerf it badly ’cause it suffers from the Law of Inverse Ninjas again. 

Chris: Maybe they wanted to show that time had passed and things had progressed. Or maybe they thought it would go with… ‘Cause it’s kind of a steampunky feel to it. Or dieselpunk maybe. Maybe they thought it would go… Except for it’s the opposite now because now it’s hard to use metal for anything. 

Oren: Now metalbending is actually bad. It’s actually worse than normal earthbending in the Korra universe because the metalbenders that they show never do normal earthbending. They’re fighting big robots made of platinum and they don’t open holes underneath the robots, which is what I would expect you to do. ‘Cause I guess they don’t know how to do that. And so instead they’re ineffectually throwing bits of metal at the giant metal robot and it’s very sad.

Chris: [Laughs]

Oren: It’s like, this is the best we could manage? 

Chris: Sometimes that’s what happens if you make character powers too powerful, now they have to use them very badly or else they just insta-win. Which is why it’s better to have smaller powers that your character can be clever in using, as opposed to really powerful powers that they have to be really incompetent at. 

Oren: And of course there is the classic urban fantasy, clever trope of just using a gun.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: But see, it was a cultural taboo to use guns, and so nobody thought of breaking this cultural taboo against guns. 

Oren: Friends don’t let friends randomly introduce a gun into their urban fantasy setting. Well, now you’ve opened that Pandora’s box. 

Chris: It’s not clever to use something that we really needed the audience to forget about.

Oren: If you have a big conceit about not using it–it’s the same thing with every Star Trek writer thinks they’re clever by having the characters do something universe-breaking with the transporter. Every new version of Star Trek, we have to go through this, “Well, what if we just beamed a bomb to the other ship?”

Don’t do that. That would be really bad for the story if we could do that. That’s not clever. Everyone has already thought of that. Well, with that, I think we have reached the point where we will cleverly decide to end the podcast before we run out of things to say. 

Chris: So if we said something clever that you found useful, obviously that is a positive turning point for us. So it would be very satisfying if you supported us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.