Recently the question came up on Twitter of whether it’s possible to write a character who’s significantly smarter than you. The short answer is, yes, it is! But how do you do so?

First, it’s important to determine what exactly makes your character “smart.” Sherlock Holmes is extremely observant, with a wealth of knowledge and the ability to put together subtle clues that most people would miss, or wouldn’t know what to do with. Dr. Daniel Jackson is fluent in twenty-three languages. MacGyver can make explosives out of the stuff you find in your kitchen, or build an airplane out of bamboo and trash bags.

Second, you might want to consider whether your character is realistically intelligent. “We’ll go as foreigners….I speak twenty-three different languages; pick one,” is one of my favorite lines from SG-1, but even for the most gifted linguists, it takes one to two years to become proficient in a foreign language, and unless they started learning it as a child, they still won’t have anything approaching native fluency. Being able to converse in twenty-three different languages is one thing; being able to pass for a native is something else entirely.

Dr. Bruce Banner gets a lot of flack in the online fan community for having seven Ph.D.’s, because what’s the point? People who have never gotten a Ph.D. see having one as a sign of intelligence, so having more than one must mean more intelligence. But while smart people are more likely to pursue higher education than your average Joe, to a degree with enough statistical significance that level of education achieved is used by psychologists as a factor in determining baseline IQ when testing for brain damage, the number of doctorates a person holds doesn’t matter. Why would you start from scratch in a new field when you could use that time to be making advances in the one you’ve already mastered?

That’s not to say your character can’t be a genius. Real geniuses do exist! And of course it makes sense to write stories about them. But just like Olympic athletes spend all their time training, most people who have made breakthroughs in science don’t have time to lead what we would consider normal lives. Intelligence isn’t some sort of cheat code that allows a person to master a subject without putting in the work. It can certainly make it easier, and an intelligent character could well pick up new skills faster than the average person, but if they’re trying to be the best in their field, some sacrifices must be made.

Alright, so you know what makes your character smart and you’ve done your research on whether their abilities are plausible. How do you actually write them?

This depends on what sort of smart you want them to be. If their intelligence isn’t integrally relevant to the story, for example you want to write about a rocket scientist but don’t yourself have any knowledge of the subject, you can give them a job at NASA and include a few scenes where they’re pondering some trajectory problem or working through an equation while hand-waving the details, which would probably just bore your readers anyway. You’ll have to do some research about what sorts of things rocket scientists actually do, and perhaps run your draft by someone who actually understands rocket science, but neither you nor your reader need to understand the details in order to make it believable that your character does understand them.

It gets a bit more complicated if the characters area of expertise is relevant to the plot, but the philosophy remains the same. It just means that you have to do more research in order to ensure the plot remains plausible. You can’t just pick and choose the parts that are easiest to understand.

For example, when writing Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton didn’t actually have to figure out how to clone dinosaurs, he just had to learn enough about cloning that the story made sense. If you want your character to build a time machine, you don’t have to be able to build such a machine yourself, but you do have to consider how you’re going to deal with potential paradoxes, hopefully in a way that doesn’t contradict our current scientific understanding. I myself have a character named Zibeon Naberius who’s a master strategist. You know he’s a master strategist because he’s won a lot of battles. He’s also an expert at predicting what people will do and manipulating them to do what he wants. It’s fairly easy for me to write this because I already know how my characters will react in a given situation, and what will make them behave in a particular way. I created them, after all.

That brings us to another great way to demonstrate intelligence: show your character figuring something out that you already know. The go-to method is to have them solve a Rubik’s Cube, but that doesn’t really require intelligence, just the ability to memorize and apply the seven steps; it’s pretty easy to find a guide to solving one online. As far as I know there is no guide to solving a Square-1, which is kind of like a Rubik’s Cube but also mutates its shape—I had to figure out how to solve that shit myself—but on the other hand, nobody’s ever heard of a Square-1, so it wouldn’t serve its purpose of signaling to your readers that this character is supposed to be smart.

A better way might be to show them solving clues, or figuring out the answer to a riddle. Think of the last mystery novel you read, or episode of a CSI-type show that you watched. There are going to be clues scattered throughout the plot that you probably missed the first time around, but that make it pretty obvious who the killer is when you go back and read or watch it for the second time. The author of course knew who the killer was from the beginning, or at least by the time they started writing the final draft. That’s what allows the characters to finally determine the truth. The same can be said for a riddle. You don’t have to be able to solve the riddle yourself without knowing the answer, or it could have taken you ages to figure it out, but your character could still solve it in a matter of seconds.

In this vein, sometimes intelligence isn’t about what you’re able to understand so much as how quickly you’re able to understand it. A child prodigy doesn’t have to be any smarter at ten than you are now. The difference between a smart student and an average student is often in the fact that the smart student understands the lesson as soon as it’s explained, often before the teacher delves into the details. I taught myself to divide when I was four because I’d learned addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Subtraction was just opposite-addition, so it made sense that there had to be an opposite-multiplication. It wasn’t that other students couldn’t learn division when it was explained to them; it was that I comprehended it on an instinctive level. I’ll often make connections between things that others miss, or that aren’t necessary to understanding the topic but make it easier to grasp, such as when I was learning geometry in seventh grade and forgot half the formulas for circles on my final exam, but was able to re-derive them from the ones I remembered because I’d discovered how they were all interconnected, or the time when I figured out that the Greek histemi was just a reduplicated form and had originally been sistemi (in Greek the perfect tense is formed by reduplicating the first consonant of the stem, such as pepaideuka being the perfect tense of paideuo), but the s had become an h in the same way that the word for six, which is sex in Latin, is hex in Greek. The teacher, who had a Ph.D. in the subject, had never even considered this, although as soon as I pointed it out he agreed that it made sense. Inventing or discovering something requires more intelligence than simply using or replicating it, so if you’re writing historical fiction or fantasy, you can use your modern knowledge to have your characters invent or discover something that is known in modern times but not in the setting of your story.

Similarly, smart people have an easier time picking up skills and knowledge. If you want your character to have a skill you yourself possess, but just be better than you, or have picked it up more easily, it’s a simple matter of shortening the timeline of when they acquired it. If it’s a skill you don’t possess, you’ll have to do some research to be sure what they’re doing is possible, then simply describe what they’re doing rather than how they’re doing it. It’s a story, not an instruction manual.

For knowledge, if you want your character to be an expert in a given topic, you will yourself have to become knowledgeable about it in order to have them speak intelligently, but you don’t have to retain that knowledge. I have a character named Lixa Ratrau who is described as a “font of useless knowledge.” She can wax eloquent on the etymology of just about any word. In order to write her, I make notes about interesting trivia that I learn that might be relevant to the dialogue, and also do quick etymology searches on Google about different words that come up.

Writing a character who’s fluent in multiple languages, like Dr. Jackson, can be both the easiest and the hardest method of writing a character who’s smarter than you. The easiest, because you can simply translate all their conversations into English and simply tell the reader that it’s in a foreign language; the hardest, because if you want to do more than that, you run the risk of an actually bilingual reader calling you on your bullshit. The percentage of people who speak at least one other language is much higher than the percentage of people who understand rocket science.

This comes up a lot in the context of writers writing bilingual characters who aren’t necessarily smarter than anyone else, they’re just foreigners who speak English as a second language, or are the children of immigrants. Code-switching is a big thing that most monolingual writers get wrong. “Salaam, that is, hello,” isn’t really something people say. Sometimes they’ll say something like, “Salaam. Hello.” Even then, though, in my experience, that usually occurs when they’re speaking with someone who understands both languages, and multiple, effuse greetings are the norm. “Salaam. Sobh bekheyr. Khubi? Halet chetore?” That translates to, “Hello. Good morning. Are you well? How are you?”

Another thing that I’ve heard of is a character saying something like, “Bonjour. Comment ça va? Oh, I’m sorry, sometimes I forget what language I’m speaking. Hello. How are you?” While it’s true that multilingual people often do accidentally speak in the wrong language, they don’t typically realize it until they get blank looks from whoever they’re talking to, in which case they’ll just switch to the correct language—or to another incorrect language, if they know more than two languages. When I was in Ireland learning Irish Gaelic, I’d just come off a year of a semi-immersion course in French, and there were times when the first half of my utterance would come out in French and the rest would come out in Irish, e.g. “Je ponce que ta me ar strae.” I’ve read a story about someone who was in a foreign country trying to order a coffee, ordered in the wrong language, corrected themself in a second incorrect language, and apologized in a third, all the while the poor barista was just looking on in horror, not understanding a word they were saying.

Personally, I drop a few foreign phrases into my speech, usually in places where they’ll be easily understood, or it doesn’t matter whether people understand me. If I’m trying to make my way through a crowd, I might say, “Gabh mo leisceal” for excuse me, then “Go raibh maith agat” for thank you, since really the important part is getting people’s attention. I’ll also tack “Insh’allah” onto the end of a statement of something I hope will occur, and mutter “Alhamdullilah” when something finally goes my way. In addition, I’ll use “Befarma’in” when inviting someone to proceed me through a door, because there isn’t a good English equivalent of the sentiment. I once had a friend greet me with “Salaam aleykum,” to which I quite naturally replied “Aleykum al-salaam.” This surprised her, since it had been a while since she’d heard the proper response, and she hadn’t really been thinking when she used the Turkish greeting rather than an English one.

Code-switching can occur on the micro or macro level. On the micro level, a person might switch between two or more languages within the space of a single conversation, due to a variety of reasons that still aren’t adequately understood. From my personal experience, and reading the experiences of others, I can confidently say that certain set phrases might be more readily expressed in one language than another, such as greetings, prayers, and curses. I watched a comedy skit once in which an Arab felt comfortable cursing in English because “Allah doesn’t speak English,” and some children of immigrants feel more comfortable cursing in English than in their parents’ tongue because of their strict upbringing; on the other hand, I’m a native English speaker, and while I do know some foreign curses because I find them fascinating, if I stub my toe I’m going to revert to my native tongue.

One bilingual speaker on Twitter wrote that they use their native-language terms to refer to most vegetables, which makes sense especially when such vegetables are less common in American cuisine. Code-switching occurs quite easily on the level of single words that aren’t easily translatable into the language being spoken. We can see this in the English language’s propensity for adopting foreign vocabulary for concepts we don’t already have, like kamikaze and schadenfreude.

In my experience code-switching most often occurs in the context of conversations where all participants speak both languages. When talking to someone who only speaks English, with the exception of specific utterances such as greetings or prayers, I’m not going to randomly slip into speaking Persian; but in class this past month, the teachers would switch almost randomly between speaking Persian and speaking English, often within a single sentence. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that where there was a calque between English and Persian, that is a word or phrase that was translated in a word-for-word or root-for-root manner, often the teacher would simply use the English word in an otherwise Persian sentence.

Unfortunately, this is very difficult to demonstrate in a natural manner within a story, unless you’re specifically writing for an audience that understands both languages; and if your character is intended to be smarter than you, and speak languages which you do not yourself understand, that is unlikely to be the case.

Another aspect of the multilingual character is one who has to figure out a language that nobody else understands, like Dr. Jackson in the Stargate movie. A solid foundation in linguistics can help with this, as can any experience with translating foreign languages. I found the line “I think the circle says ‘The place of our legacy’…or it could be ‘a piece of our leg,’ my translation’s a bit vague,” to be utterly hilarious, although the alliteration between the two possibilities interfered with the suspension of disbelief. You can experiment with putting foreign language text into Google translate and studying the hilarity that results. Most recently, in my personal experience, we were working on a translation in class about growing grapes, and Google insisted that one word from the passage meant “shit,” when in context that didn’t make sense. One of the students translated it as “shovel” instead, which was one of the alternative meanings. Well, turns out that it did mean “shit,” since it was talking about fertilizer.

As with the rocket science example above, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in linguistics to write this sort of character, although at least some knowledge on the subject does help. The more detailed you want to get about what exactly they’re translating, the more knowledge you’ll have to have. At one end of the scale, you can simply describe the ancient writings as blocky text or incomprehensible squiggles, and then have the character remark that they’re similar to some writing system the character knows; or if it’s a spoken language, describe it as guttural, or melodic, or however you interpret the living language most similar to what you imagine the language to be. On the other end of the spectrum, you can include the actual inscription or phonetic rendition of the speech in your text, as Tolkien did in The Lord of the Rings. Depending on how smart you want your translator character to be, and how much you want your multilingual readers to relate, you can have them have a single epiphany after which they translate flawlessly, or have them struggle and gradually make sense of what’s being said.

Spoken language is often more difficult for non-native speakers to parse than written language, since there’s more of a margin for error based on missing or mishearing part of the message. While the grammar of written language is more complicated, since it depends on the fact that you can read and re-read until you understand what’s going on, having to translate spoken words in your head into your native tongue makes it more difficult to follow the flow of the conversation. However this doesn’t hold true for languages like Mandarin which have a non-phonetic alphabet; most non-native speakers of Mandarin are better at listening than at reading. And even for languages like Persian where the reading is easier than the listening, there are children of immigrants who grew up speaking the language at home but never learned to read it.

Consulting with people who are well-versed in the subject is always a good idea. I wouldn’t call bilingualism a topic for a sensitivity reader, unless your character is a non-native speaker of the primary language spoken in your book; it’s more like doing research on the subject of medieval fashions, or making sure your depiction of a modern city is accurate and the time it takes to get from one place to another makes sense. Though I don’t myself have a degree in linguistics, I have studied the topic extensively, and have a degree in Classics, which covers Greek and Roman language and literature. If you want to consult on the topic of multilingual characters or fantasy languages, I’m happy to be of assistance.

In summary, it’s quite possible to write characters who are more intelligent than yourself. You just have to figure out what it is that makes them intelligent, and how to portray that in a manner that you can do justice.