I’ve seen countless threads and blog posts about the best way to write a smart character, how to make a character seem like a super genius, how to make a villain a meticulous mastermind, etc. etc. Rarely have I seen anybody ask the opposite question. How do I write a stupid character? In my opinion, it’s much harder to write a believably unintelligent person. The problem is that a genius is interesting by default, while stupid characters are off-putting by default, a cardinal sin in fiction writing. It’s also easy to make a character stupid in a way that doesn’t make any sense, pushing them even further toward unapproachable. Because of this inherent difficulty, many people don’t even attempt to write unintelligent characters unless it’s for a throwaway side character, or they’re writing for comedy. I’m more interested in a serious take on stupidity. First though, I feel my hand is forced to write about the prevalence of geniuses first. There are so many vast intellects in fiction that I think it will be easier to approach a stupid character from the opposite end.

To that end, let’s talk about why geniuses are interesting, and how they’re written. It might go without saying, but smart people usually achieve things most people are incapable of. Tony Stark builds his super powers while others are gifted with them, same with a villain like Lex Luthor. Sherlock can solve crimes and read a person in an instant. Einstein, who is a real person, but has been mythologized to the point of being fictional, revolutionized our entire way of viewing reality. The appeal is obvious. Characters who achieve great things are fun to associate ourselves with.

In works of fiction their intelligence is almost always balanced out by some sort of drawback. In real life though, somebody who’s smart may also be perfectly healthy. They probably have some negative traits just like the rest of us, but I haven’t found most people’s intelligence to be directly related to their flaws. In fiction however, a super achiever without any major negative traits is boring and unrelatable to the extreme. Furthermore, relating their intellect to their flaws makes it easier to swallow how much smarter they are than us. Tony is a narcissist asshole because he thinks his intelligence makes him better than everyone. Sherlock is incurably ill due to his intellect. Lex Luthor is a psychopathic villain whose acquired knowledge is largely a result of cold indifference to human suffering. What about Einstein though? Well he had rough marriages, adulterous affairs, and a difficult time with his sons (one of whom had schizophrenia). Those aren’t directly related to him being smart though, are they? Plenty of stupid people have the same problems. So instead of talking about that stuff, people made up something new: he failed basic math because he was so smart he became an underachiever. This isn’t true at all. He claimed to have mastered calculus by fifteen in fact. It sure makes the rest of us feel better though. In reality, I doubt his intellect really had much to do with his personal failures. I’ve known personable geniuses and annoying idiots. We like to relate these traits because, well, how can they possibly be unrelated? It’s more poetic that way, but I just haven’t found much true to life evidence of these traits being directly tied to one another, for better or for worse. Sometimes they are, but it’s person by person. No one trait is always associated with the other … except in the annals of fiction of course.

While I get the desire to have a smart character, I don’t understand why anybody has much difficulty with writing them. Generally speaking, smart people have lots of knowledge at their disposal, and make decisions fast. That’s about all you need to convince a reader that someone is a genius. Look at Sherlock for example. In most versions of the media, the man is an opium addict who lives all alone in a dingy apartment that he never cleans. He relies on his few friends for groceries and other basic necessities. He leaves his chemistry experiments right next to the place he makes food. He shoots holes in his walls for fun, treats everyone around him like trash, and generally lives the life of a complete degenerate. Does that alone seem like someone capable of making smart decisions in record time? He has more in common with a mentally handicapped drug addict than an actual genius, probably because he actually is a mentally handicapped drug addict. Usually, you’d see a person like this as incomprehensibly stupid. How could someone with two braincells to rub together leave their life in shambles like that? In the face of all these traits we associate with a lack of intelligence though, his deduction skills and lightning quick memory win out. Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve been predisposed to accept that all geniuses have fatal flaws. The script is flipped, and suddenly his unhealthy traits aren’t a result of lack of intelligence, but an overabundance. Rather than see these as conflicting traits, they line up completely. One trait trumps all the other evidence we have that Sherlock is a dysfunctional moron. Thus if you want to write a smart character, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Show them solving problems quickly, and presenting lots of rare information as if it was common knowledge. This will turn anyone into the prototypical flawed genius no matter how poorly they perform in any other region of their life.

And now we’ve come to why it’s so hard to write a stupid person. No matter how stupid they may seem, any redeeming characteristics will actually point the reader to how much of a savant they are. Suddenly you aren’t writing someone without much intellect, but actually a misunderstood super genius with a rare talent. What’s worse is you can’t just leave a stupid character without any redeeming characteristics, just like you can’t leave a genius without any flaws. Unfortunately, they amount to the same character. A flawed genius is just a hair’s breadth away from a redeemable idiot, and most people would rather see a flawed genius because of how highly we value intelligence. The stupid character can’t excel at any one thing because that one point of achievement will overshadow all the rest and turn them into a genius. If they don’t excel at anything though, why on Earth would anybody want to read about them? It’s quite the catch 22.

So how can someone overcome this problem? It seems impossible to make an unintelligent character interesting because of anything of interest will be associated with a vast intelligence. We value it so much that any good traits become conflated with the one trait of intelligence. We value it so much that even bad traits become yet more evidence of a character’s genius. Unfortunately, I think the solution I have in mind is a little too long to append to the end of this post. I’ll have to finish this one off tomorrow with a part two. I hope you can stick with me on this one though, I had a lot of fun writing it!

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley