What's the best way to write a genius character?

Say you wanted to write a first-person story about a super-intelligent individual? I’m fairly bright ( I like to think so) but I’m no MENSA member; how do you do it without making all of the other people in it sound like idiots or your person a condescending jerk or just using large words?

The Ender books are a good example.

What is the super-intelligent individual trying to do, in the story?

Like, if it’s “pass for normal while anticipating the reactions of people he’s conning,” then nobody needs to sound like an idiot (as long as their remarks are anticipated), sure as your character would use small words (while trying his level best to sound neither jerkish nor condescending). Or whatever.

Was Einstein condescending? Feynman? The first thing you should do is to stay away from the stereotypes.
The second thing you should do is to realize that to a genius hard stuff seems simple. Think of something that comes easy to you. To a genius, hard stuff comes just as easily. Feynman wrote in his autobiography that he just got calculus at 15. He didn’t study hard, he didn’t struggle, he just got it.
And you can watch Amadeus again. Mozart appeared to write his works in his head.

The reaction of a genius to those who can’t do what he or she does is not derision or scorn, but just a bit of astonishment that they don’t get it also.

You seem to want to want to focus in the genius part which is going to be very difficult to do as illustrating a mental process is problematic. Some writers make genius characters “damaged” in some way to make them relatable in some way but this almost a trope at this point.

The Sherlock Holmes stories are not a bad place to start. In that case you have the genius illustrated by the actions and reactions of others (Watson etc) around him.

Very helpful answers, folks. Thanks!

Yeah, I think here’s the crux of my problem. I find it more impressive if I know how hard the thing they’re doing is-I can just say “He wrote a paper on thermodynamics that was revolutionary” but it’s more impressive to SEE the person do or create the smart thing. Does that make sense? And you’re right about the mental process, astro

You, as the author, make the character be right. Was your character’s prediction amazing, astounding, unlikely, hard to believe? Too bad–you’re the author, so you make the character right, and everyone is amazed.

In scifi, you can invent technobabble. After all, if you can’t dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.

Last option is to nurture one or two pieces of obscure knowledge, and have your character present them as if it ain’t no thang. The English Patient gets a lot of mileage of out the first page–literally the first page–of Herodotus. So does Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Others quote Shakespeare or game theory or blah blah blah. Your audience will look it up later and realize it wasn’t THAT special, but in the moment, when you catch them off guard, it can be effective.

A good way to do this would be to have the genius character easily solve a problem that has baffled everyone else for a long time. And bonus points if 1) his explanation sounds absurd but genius - and 2) other people don’t believe him at first.

So suppose for instance that MH370 were a fictional mystery rather than a real-life event. You could have everyone - all the experts, too - believing that the missing Malaysian airliner was downed near Vietnam. And then have the genius say, “The jet is in the Indian Ocean.” Everyone laughs him off - that’s absurd; what, the Indian Ocean?? But the genius calmly, confidently, insists - the jet is in the Indian Ocean. He then gives a good explanation as for why it’s there - everyone reluctantly goes along with his plan - and lo and behold, the jet is found in the Indian Ocean.

Now, if the genius is to be a likable character, it is vital that he must be humble, but if he is supposed to be dislikable, then he can arrogant away.

It absolutely makes sense: you’re expressing the principle behind “show, don’t tell” here.

I can tell you what not to do. Don’t put a number on his IQ. No one really has a 187 IQ, because the tests most commonly used go to 150, and people with a 150 IQ are geniuses. People in the Guinness book with higher IQs have had them extrapolated, and they are not official. The test was never meant to measure the high end of achievement, they were meant to identify people who need help, so basically once it’s established that you are normal or better, they stop looking at you.

Someone who has an extraordinary IQ would simply “exceed the parameters of the test,” but really, someone with, say, a 148 IQ is enormously smart. You should be able to say that a character has a 148 IQ and have people gasp at this tremendous number, but its effect has been ruined by writers who don’t know what they are talking about.

Also, don’t give him HSAM, or an eidetic memory, or any parlour tricks like that. He will have a good memory, because while generally speaking, intelligent people have good recall, genius does not require these savant skills (you don’t have to be autistic or retarded to have a savant skill-- people with ordinary intelligence have them too), and they are vanishingly rare among all strata of intelligence.

Don’t invent a character who knows 12 languages, unless you invent a background where that would be the situation-- for example, parents of different nationalities, who traveled a lot, as journalists or in the military, so the person lived in a number of different countries, or unless the languages are all related. My mother, for example, who is smarter than the average bear, but probably not a genius, speaks eight languages; however, most of them are all Slavic languages, and she learned one of them in the home as a child. Another is Yiddish, which she also learned as a child, and another is English, which she learned as a child. She had one set of grandparents who spoke Slovak, one set who spoke Yiddish, and she was born in the US. Then she learn Latin in high school, and Czech, Polish, Russian, and Old Church Slavonic in college and grad school. Plus, lots of time spent in E. Europe. And to be fair, she doesn’t speak Latin or OCS, just reads then, and just speaks Polish, doesn’t read it.

I went into that much detail about my mother, because that’s a real picture of someone who knows a number of languages. She has, no surprise, a Ph.D in linguistics.

Now, highly intelligent people are usually bi- or tri- lingual, but they usually have traveled. They spent time abroad studying, and they need to deal with texts in an original language, so they spend time in the text’s source country. But three languages is a real accomplishment. Four is believable. More beyond that, without a good backstory, or the languages being closely related, is not believable. In other words, you can get away with mentioning off-handedly that the character speaks three languages, but more than that, and you need backstory.

My father was one of the smartest people I have ever known. There was never a question I could ask him that he couldn’t answer. There was never homework I could bring him he couldn’t help with, even when I took a college physics class over the summer when I was spending some time at home. He spoke very little in social situations. He never dominated the conversation. I have some cousins who are doctors, lawyers, a rabbi, and several Ph.D. They don’t prattle on about their specialties, unless people ask. They are all more gregarious than my father, but socially, they talk about completely ordinary things, and never show off their intellects. In fact, I’m probably the lowest achieving academically, having only a BA, but I probably can do the most “parlour tricks,” like solving the Rubik’s cube, or beating everyone at Trivial Pursuit, or repeating lists verbatim. I’m the one who can figure out how a magic trick was done, and so forth, but I’m not by a long shot the smartest, so all those memory game and puzzles are not tests of genius. Genius goes much deeper.

And, FWIW, all the really smart people I know are deeply caring and compassionate, with good social skills. The quirky genius who is an oddball may be funny, but it’s not realistic.

You can “Show not tell” in regard to writing a paper, too though, without having to make the readers read paragraphs of raw data. Instead of just stating “He wrote this paper, etc.” You can show him reading the gally proof (or whatever they call them on computers-- back when I did proof reading, that’s what we called them), and finding a typo that would have created a math error, and establish character through his internal dialogue in reaction to it. You can also have some internal dialogue regarding him looking forward to telling his mother he had another article out-- or wishing his parents appreciated what it meant to publish an article, or any number of things that could indicate a relationship, and maybe even some of his motivation for pursuing his subject-- aside from raw interest in it.

Have them solve problems in non-standard ways.

Now…this is going to be tricky, because it requires you to do some heavy thinking. But since it’s fiction, you can get away with a measure of mere plausibility.

There was an old comic book where the characters received a death-threat by phone. The last thing they hear is “Please deposit fifteen cents for two more minutes.” Then the line goes dead. The “genius” character calls the phone company and finds all the exchanges from which a call, to his own location, would be asked for fifteen cents for two more minutes. He gets a list, which narrows down the subsequent search.

Valid? Hey, probably not. But it sounded smart. It was making use of what information he had. It’s somewhat “Sherlockian.”

The principle can fail…

Holmes: There are exactly 759 sheep in that meadow.
Watson: How did you deduce that?
Holmes: Elementary! I counted the legs and divided by four.

Realistic genius characters in fiction are hard to write because they’re hard to balance. That’s why so often you see characters which everyone in-universe tells you they’re smart but end up doing something inexplicably stupid in the 3rd act to resolve the story.

I think Enders Game and The Martian are both very good depictions of genuinely genius characters because they don’t just get the actions right, they get the attitudes right as well. Also, Terry Pratchett manages to skewer the image of a genius in several of his Discworld characters in ways that feel authentic.

But the fact that so few stories manage to do it well demonstrate how genuinely hard it is to portray it realistically.

Take a look at Sherlock Holmes. He was shown to be a genius by having him make bold statements that he explained later. The explanations were indeed elementary. Conan Doyle wrote the stories knowing what Holmes was talking about, but they seemed mysterious to the reader.

Consider Holmes’s talking about the curious incident of the dog in the night time. Conan Doyle knew what the curious incident was – he had plotted it out. But the reader did not, so the comment is mysterious and, when pointed out later, it shows how smart Holmes is. Ultimately, Holmes read the script in advance and spoke using that knowledge. It made him look like a genius.

Oh, also, don’t say that he skipped six grades. Schools don’t do that much anymore. It used to be a pretty common practice, along with holding students back. Now, the practice is to put smart kids in Gifted and Talented programs, and put kids who are struggling in resource rooms, and sometimes in remedial classes in junior high and high school, but to keep them with age mates. If a kid is so high achieving that they can’t be served in the G&T class, the school my recommend private school, and write a letter to help the kid get a scholarship. Rarely, a kid may skip a single grade, or take a few classes with older kids (like, a middle school kid might go to the high school for math, but stay at the middle school for everything else).

Some high schools are set up to let kids take extra classes, so a kid who wants to graduate a year early can, and a kid who finds the work very easy may take advantage of this, but honors classes are not usually available, so the have to take their non-honors type classes, like gym, health, US History, and soforth, in the extra hours, and if they are in a school like mine, may be able to pick up some credits taking college classes, which count double, because the credits count as high school classes, but also as college classes.

So at most, your genius probably would be able to finish public school two years early. Maybe three if he managed to start one year early.

You can’t rush college too much, because you have to take classes when they are offered, and you usually need approval to take more than 19 hours a semester. Still, you can do college in three years. I wouldn’t, even if I’m a genius who can, because you miss out on things like study abroad, which is a chance to pick up a language.

You really can’t rush a Ph.D, because you have to do original research. No matter how smart you are, the rats don’t learn the mazes any faster. It takes a minimum of six years to earn a Ph.D, and that includes course work, research, and writing the dissertation. There are other kinds of doctorates besides Ph.Ds that you can earn more quickly.

But if you start college at 15, finish at 18, take four years for graduate classwork to get, and then begin working on your research, and spend a year (which is SUPER fast) writing your dissertation, about the earliest someone can realistically get a Ph.D is age 26. My father started college at 17, and earned his Ph.D at 29, and was considered a wunderkind. He also got his master’s degree from the Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University). He participated in the Air Force ROTC while an undergraduate, and after he got his Ph.D, acted as a translator, intercepting Soviet radio transmissions while stationed in Korea, for two years. He was a full professor by age 40, and it probably would have been earlier if he hadn’t taken time out for the Air Force.

You also want to give your character a specialty. To a large degree, smarts is smarts… but how a person chooses to apply and develop those smarts will vary wildly. If you take a genius physicist, even if he hasn’t had much in the way of chemistry courses, he’ll do a lot better than the average layman in following a chemist’s description of something, but if you ask him a complicated chemistry question, he’ll tell you to ask a chemist. It’s not (necessarily) that the chemist is smarter than the physicist; he just has a different focus.

If you want to write geniuses well, read books that write geniuses well.

One of the best examples I know is Miles Vorkosigan of the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. Chronos is on the right track with smart people having specialities. In Miles’ case, he is a master of manipulating people and a superb strategist. His ability to bullshit people is second to none. His career develops along that path, starting with his first ‘‘command’’ at age 17 (which is a totally half-assed reckless ship hijacking rather than a job.) Because of his physical disability, he was denied his place in the military… so he made a place for himself. He made himself relevant.

[QUOTE=The Vor Game]
“Very good. But your most insidious chronic problem is in the area of . . . how shall I put this precisely . . . subordination. You argue too much.”

“No, I don’t,” Miles began indignantly, then shut his mouth.

Cecil flashed a grin. “Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah…” Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word.

“Equals?” Miles hazarded.

“Cattle,” Cecil corrected judiciously.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=The Vor Game]
It reminded him of that definition of his father’s. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground; the stuff in between was just noise.
[/QUOTE]

He’s flawed as hell, at times to the point of idiocy, but once you understand what drives his character, the poor decisions he does make are completely believable.

You want a character someone admires so much that they want to kick that character’s ass sometimes.

What if the rats… are also geniuses?! :eek::eek::eek:

dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN!

How fast you can earn a Ph.D. often depends on your area of expertise and the specific structure of your program. Not all programs require original research. My husband’s Ph.D. in clinical psychology did require original research, qualifying exams, a Master’s Thesis, coursework, and a dissertation, and the average length of the program (including MS) was four years. The only reason it took him six years was the lack of available internships.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a professor by age 23. Great things were expected of him. Then he wrote The Birth of Tragedy and his peers were like ''WTF are you doing?"

Geniuses are sometimes misunderstood.

Just don’t be like the guy who wrote the movie about giant prehistoric snakes taking over an antarctic prison (I cannot for the life of me remember the name, but it was awesome.)

The genius protagonist had a Ph.D. in ‘‘advanced sciences.’’