How do you successfully write a character who is smarter than you?

How do you successfully write a character who is smarter than you?

I don't mean meme intelligence like giving them the ability to craft any technology out of nowhere is not intelligence; that's just magic.

Depends on what the characters supposed role of expertise is I guess.

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Not even joking or anything, just read more books about philosophy and logic.

Gloss over details

You can probably get away with not emphasizing them being super smart all the time as long as they're NOT doing things that'd read as dumb. Like having them screw up in some obvious way would probably be worse than not constantly hammering in how they're the smartest in the room, when it comes to making their stated intelligence seem believable.

You don't.
By definition if you're able to come up with their plans and knowledge then they can't be smarter than you.

plan their moves way in advance, have them react to situations they seem not to have planned about.

what the fuck does that even mean? you literally have to write the character so he needs some sort of "magic" to be that way. an intelligent character is usually rational in his actions, anticipative, and forthcoming. it often boils down to the characters being calculative and therefore knowing other character's moves. otherwise, you have to rely on the philosophical part for which you literally need to know the books and theories you are talking about

Wouldn't that make that character as smart as its author, though?

You don't, unless you want to come off as not knowing what you're writing about.

A character is only as smart as the author.

Have him come up with a perfectly logical and reasonable solution to the crisis
but have him do it in 10 seconds instead of the 2 weeks you, the author, took it figure it out.

No, a proper understanding of logic alone means you can write people seemingly smarter than you or its audience. You can predestine some actions like wrote or have him be witty compared to the rest of the cast if there is any.

Surround any average character with stupid character and that character seems smarter

Your advantage is time and research that you take for yourself but don't permit the character, so it looks like they're able to do what they do quickly and all on their own.

Alternatively, just slip them the right answers under the table because you're all-knowing and on their side without actually going all the way to developing an airtight method for how they got them (see "How Watson Learned the Trick.")

The smartest way is to write ahead of time. Make them come up with solutions to problems that might have taken you a week to figure out in a few seconds.

Of you could make them skilled in their subject matter but at or below par otherwise. A, say, PhD scientist may be able to claim award winning research in a field your audience doesn’t know or give a crap about, but might still be a petty jackass, or fall for an easy lure because they’re very much human still.

It is very very hard to pull that off, instead if you're not going for the genius recluse, play up there charisma, charm, and manipulative skills.
It's not the same as writing a smart character, bit it can make them seem smarter than they otherwise act, which is good enough in a pinch.
Once you get that down feel free to study up on philosophy to flesh them out as characters. Just remember that an ideology isn't the same as a personality, and even if you want your audience to disagree with what they say, if they can't put up good arguments for what they believe then they're going to come off as dumb.

You put them in a situation that a normal person wouldn't be able to solve, you know how they can get out of it, they have to figure it out.
Basically work top down instead of down top. You have them solve a problem that you couldn't resolve in their place, you only have the solution because you're God in their world.

If you just want them to be a genius, that is in the classical definition of being very skilled in one thing, just make sure to do some background reading on it, just to keep them from saying anything dumb.

Plant stuff in the story as early as possible that hints at ideas you may have, and make sure the character's acting on them, even if a non-obvious way, even if they're half formed, and take note of those things.

When you make use of them much later (you don't have to use all of them), it'll pay off - you can always ignore some of the ideas you planted as the character discarding them or them never being needed, like keepping a fire extinguisher at home you're glad never having to use.

think about consequences of their actions

remember that everything they say is deliberate

try researching something in the field of the smart person you're talking about

verify with an expert on something that the character would say in a certain situation

read more of that character and stick to their personality

learn the logical fallacies

learn logical expressions that stem from mathematical proofs

have characters doubt each other. you don't necessarily have to contrive situations that always make a character right because they were smart, just let the audience know that many different possibilities are considered.

maybe it would help to watch episodes of scooby doo to see the explanations of how they "solved the mystery"

DON'T do what they did for cyclops, where the plot always supported whatever his motives were

learn acerbic sarcasm

this is also cutting corners. only do this once if you're a beginner at writing characters smarter than you. and don't make it cliche where the smart character is saying something complicated with correct vocabulary and another character goes "in english" or "cut to the chase".

those phrases are old and tired

this.

if you can't sit the fuck down and focus your message of the story, you shouldn't be writing

What philosophers do you recommend?

You have the foresight of what is going to happen in the story, so you can engineer a situation where your character believably foresaw and prepared for possible outcomes, creating the illusion of intelligence

Descartes

The same way computers can generate graphics too good to be rendered in real time: Precalculation.

Your character doesn't have all the time in the world to think of clever things, but you as the author do. You can spend all the time you need to come up with good ideas, then condense them into a shorter timeframe in the story as if the protag actually came up with them that quickly.

I've never been a fan of the whole "only you are real" mentality or stories that deal with the world being an illusion. Perhaps I'm just uncultured, but I thought that was the main meat behind Descartes's postulate,

Giver her the dick and other assorted tales.

Do a bit of research on the topic your character is an expert in. You don't have to know everything but have enough that you can imply that the character knows the rest.

The meat is "the only thing that you can know for sure is real is you", not "only you are real".
Not a fan either desu.

Recognise that you effectively have 20/20 hindsight before anything happens and have vastly longer periods of time than the character might to figure out planning, improvising, etc.
Just avoid any dumb mistakes not excused by their characterisation, and the worst you can do is have people complain they're a mary sue.

What are time and resources?
Let's say some guy & I solve an equation separately. I use a calculator, the internet and take twice as long as they do to solve it.
Surely I'm as smart as him right?
Or how about two people solving the same rubiks cube problem in significantly different time lengths?
Yeah, didn't think so.

Yeah I think a big problem is we know the character is a genius because we get told that. Not because they do anything special. Then Right at the end of the arc or episode you get a deus ex ending. The other characters get written as idiots so the genius looks good by comparison.

Yeah, sorry; I should have been more precise.
Either way, I still think that the concept of being the only possible existing thing in all of creation is complete and utter bullshit; I think I elaborated a relatively solid argument to counter that idea, but I fear sharing it since it'd be me going against one of history's most celebrated philosophers; I can't expect to win an argument against someone who by all means was far more well read an intelligent than me.

>The same way computers can generate graphics too good to be rendered in real time: Precalculation.
>Your character doesn't have all the time in the world to think of clever things, but you as the author do. You can spend all the time you need to come up with good ideas, then condense them into a shorter timeframe in the story as if the protag actually came up with them that quickly.
Why are people still posting ITT? This post is it

>I still think that the concept of being the only possible existing thing in all of creation is complete and utter bullshit
Again, that's not the concept. The whole Cogito (it irks me calling it that because he specifically wrote in French in a time where Latin was more common, but what are you gonna do) thing is an exercise in reasoning and proof, not an actual attempt at describing the world as it is.

My argument against it is it's circular reasoning. It postulates that you have to exist to reason and have consciousness. You can reason and are conscious, therefor you exist. It's kinda right, but for an argument based on deconstructing every form of perception and false proof or reality, there's some level of assumption that bothers me.

Man I hate this.
Any instance of 'Make a character look better by giving them a foil'. Just sucks.