The other day I happened to be reading through Janet Fitch’s post on 10 Writing Tips That Can Help Almost Anyone. The list is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by Tip #7: Smarten up your protagonist.

Fitch writes, “The more observant [your protagonist] can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating.” This is no doubt true, but it’s not what leaps to my mind when I think about smart protagonists.

It seems to me that there are three types of smart protagonists in fiction:

A) Protagonists who are smart because the author says they are. Every secondary character in the book just swoons over how clever and perceptive and intuitive and brilliant the Smart Protagonist is. Beautiful, too. And sexy!

A long time ago, way before I got serious about my own writing, I read a fantasy that just didn’t work for me. I gave the book to a friend, along with a comment that something was wrong with it but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem.

My friend read the book and said, “Everybody acts like the main
character is so great, but she’s really dumb as a box of rocks.”

Ever since then, I’ve kept my eye out for Smart Protagonists who are actually dumb as a box of rocks, as well as for their opposite number:

B) Protagonists who really are smart. These protagonists may go
quietly along noticing things that other characters and the reader all miss. Then they put all the pieces together and solve the problem or save the day. Nick O’Donohoe, in his 1994 fantasy novel The Magic and the Healing, was one of the first writers in whose work I found a protagonist like that when I was looking for examples.

Mysteries also often have protagonists who really are smart, because that’s kind of the point of a mystery. On the other hand, I just read three mysteries in a row (by three different authors) which all made me think, “Hey, people, I think you’re missing something here. Hello? Obviously this guy is the murderer.” I never try to figure out who done it in mysteries, so this is not a good sign. I enjoyed the books anyway because of the setting and writing, but I’d have liked them better if the protagonists had not seemed, well, pretty dim.

When you find a protagonist who really IS smart, I definitely think
it’s worth studying how the author pulls off the effect.

Rarer, and at least as hard to pull off, is the third kind of Smart Protagonist:

c) The Genius Protagonist. The one who springs immediately to my mind is Archimedes (yes, THAT Archimedes) in Gillian Bradshaw’s great book, The Sand Reckoner. Now, THERE is a genius!

Writing a protagonist who is way, way smarter than you are presents special problems. When I wrote a genius character — Lady Tehre, in LAND OF THE BURNING SANDS, Book Two of The Griffin Mage trilogy — at least she was not the MAIN character. Her relatively minor role made her easier to handle, but she was still a lot of work to write! Fun, but oh, the research I put in every time she opened her mouth!

Of course, not every protagonist has to be smart — lots of protagonists stand out because they have great integrity or sheer grit or unexpected depths or whatever rather than because they are brilliant. But almost any protagonist is going to work better if he (or she) is not dumb as a box of rocks — or if the protagonist is SUPPOSED to be dumb, then at least all the secondary characters should not be awed by the protagonist’s cleverness.

That, for me, is a sure way to sink a book.