Writing Clever Characters

Sometimes we need our heroes - and our villains - to do cunning things. We need to them steal something, or win a fight, or have a master plan, and it needs to be brilliant.

How does a writer manage this? For a lucky few of us, we can just intuit through a challenging situation. For everyone else, you’re going to have to plan. Your characters are going to have a plan (you don’t have to tell the reader about it, you can just show it being executed) and that plan is going to need some brains behind it.

For a plan to feel clever, you’re going to need to have thought through the details of your scenario - whether it’s robbing a bank or pulling off a grift - and know them very well. Once you understand the bank or the scam and your character’s motivations, you have to think through the plan from the character’s point of view. What are they best at? What are they trying to accomplish? How can their unique skills work in their favor? How can they best create their own success?

So, for example, if you have a bank to rob, you need to know what the bank is like. Is there a safe? How does it work? What are they stealing? Is it heavy? Once you know your character is getting in with dynamite and carrying out gold bars, you have room to start applying their special traits to the scenario. What do they have in their favor? Strength, speed, numbers, a hidden ally, a hired gun, a demolitions expert?

Once your clever plan is ready, you’re going to need something to go wrong. Everything happening according to plan is awesome, but the reversals and the unexpected problems are going to reveal your character like nothing else. What if the dynamite doesn’t breach the lock? What if there’s five times as much gold as expected? What if there are guards in the vault? How the character handles these unexpected problems creates additional excitement as you resolve the plan.