Intelligence via Empathy and Respect
If you want your characters to be Level I Intelligent, you have to use empathy (see Ch. 27 of HPMOR). You must keep your brain running in the sandbox mode where you make your brain similar to the character’s brain.
The other thing you could do, but must not do, is use pattern-recognition to fill in the blank. If you see a picture of a bush in a coloring book, you don’t need to reason about photons and wavelengths to recognize that the bush ought to be filled in green, just like other bushes or bush-pictures that you’ve seen. You also don’t need to inhabit the inner life of a vampire to recognize that the vampire ought to speak in a hiss or have cold skin. Sky is colored blue, bush is colored green, vampire hisses a lot and drinks someone’s blood…
That vampire isn’t going to be very Level I Intelligent, or very original, if you enact them by fill-in-the-blank. If you want to find the best-seeming action on your character’s behalf, you’re going to have to live inside their heads, and lend your brain’s power to give them their inner spark.
I can offer you two major techniques for getting inside your character’s head like this. The first obvious technique is the method of self-insertion: Would you wear the old-fashioned clothing of your birth era, if you were a vampire? Take a moment to think about this. Would you? What considerations would you take into account? How would you do that seems to best optimize those considerations and the rest of your life, instead of wearing old clothes for the sake of the plot, so that readers can easily recognize you as a fill-in-the-blank vampire?
The second and less obvious technique is the method of respect. Empathy follows respect, and it flees from any character whose status you have an inner need to lower. In the aftermath of the 9/11 hijacking, some politician or another claimed that the 9/11 hijackers were ‘cowards’. Which is blatantly false. If you imagine yourself boarding a plane for a suicide mission, intending to deliberately crash it with yourself on board, you will realize that it takes a certain amount of physical courage.
It’s not that people can’t empathize with villains. George Lucas discovered, much to his surprise at the time, that a lot of viewers in Star Wars seemed fascinated by Darth Vader. Being able to predict an adversary would have been an important ancestral use of empathy. It’s when people have an inner need to lower someone’s status that the thread of empathy is broken.
Okay, now consider this segment of the original Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Canon!Hermione is addressing canon!Harry, just before canon!Harry goes off to do something dangerous:
“Harry—you’re a great wizard, you know.”“I’m not as good as you,” said Harry, very embarrassed, as she let go of him.
“Me!” said Hermione. “Books! And cleverness! There are more important things—friendship and bravery and—oh Harry—be careful!”
Now before you think ill of J. K. Rowling, consider that Rowling says that Hermione was the character she based on herself, and Rowling herself is good enough with ‘books and cleverness’ to be a self-made billionaire at it. In that sense it’s self-deprecation, not casting down geniuses.
But even so this is a passage you can’t imagine reading in HPMOR, and that’s because HPMOR doesn’t status-cap books and cleverness. Friendship and bravery matter too, in HPMOR; but HPMOR makes no concessions to the sentiment that the virtue of bookishness must be status-capped underneath the virtue of bravery.
You can’t write a realistic genius character if you feel the need to status-cap them, if you have a sense that you must prevent them from being too intelligent because that would interfere with the story’s moral about how Bravery Is More Important Than Wisdom, or whatever. It’s not so much that this cap would hinder their spark of optimization, as that it would break your empathy with the character: you will have trouble empathizing with someone whose status you have an inner need to lower, because your political brain won’t want to tell their real story.
This isn’t to say that your characters shouldn’t learn valuable life lessons, but they should learn, well, respectably. If you yourself remember learning a lesson the hard way, you may have in your mind an image of what it means to make that mistake in the process of honestly trying to do the best thing, instead of making the mistake in the process of serving the plot or keeping the character’s status capped.
And to state the more obvious channel by which respect creates intelligence: if you create a character you truly respect, you will hesitate to model them as stupid. Professor Quirrell’s cynicism (though not, so far as I know, his intent to kill) is based on a mixture of two cynical friends of mine, Robin Hanson and Michael Vassar. I respect Hanson and Vassar enough that even when they are wrong I generally consider them as being persuasively wrong. When I mentally hold Professor Quirrell to the standard of my model of Hanson and Vassar, my brain makes Professor Quirrell generate persuasive cynicism, and insert as many grains of truth as possible even though I disagree with his conclusions.
This leads me to the second shortcut for creating a Level I Intelligent character: just blatantly steal someone, from real life or fiction, whose intelligence you genuinely respect.
You can simply write a character as if they are BBC’s Sherlock, or Miles Vorkosigan, or any other person for whose thinking you feel a visceral respect. Your own literary voice will take over and shine through, and the vast majority of your readers will not notice the similarity unless you tell them… if you sympathized enough with Sherlock or Vorkosigan to have felt their inner lives, and you are generating them in their new role by continuing to lead that life from the inside. If you just use pattern completion to fill in the catchphrases that you saw on television, then yes, people will notice.
Or, to go back to the even simpler cheat, you can check for intelligence by imagining yourself in the character’s shoes. What would you do if you became a vampire? What would you do if a vampire and a werewolf were both in love with you? If the answer is something you’ve never seen in a story before, you may have a plot on your hands…
Or maybe you’re writing a story with a villain, and the villain has a volcano base. What sort of volcano base? Well, there’s other ways to answer this question, but one way of answering this is: what sort of volcano base would you build, if you had a volcano base? Would you have your own trampoline? Imagine watching a movie where the villain’s volcano base has a trampoline in the throne room, not because the movie is making fun of itself, but because the villain is just doing the sorts of things you would do with a volcano base and nobody to tell you ‘no’ to things. Maybe the villainess is wearing comfortable jogging pants and making her servants wear the black leather. I’d watch that movie, if only because it wouldn’t be the same as all the pattern-filling movies.
I have noticed that I often like novels written in first-person; and I suspect that when authors write stories and use “I” for the character’s voice, they are more likely to have that character try to be intelligent sometimes. (Examples: The novel Jumper (not the movie); the fanfictions Dreaming of Sunshine, The Lie I’ve Lived, and Who I Am.) It is somehow easier to write “Thorin threw down the key and walked away” than “I threw down the key and walked away.” If you imagine your real, actual self, the literal you being put into Thorin’s shoes, then instead of trying to fill in “what a stubborn dwarf would do”, you shall perhaps imagine yourself actually thinking. If you imagine your actual self being suddenly transported into Thorin’s body then you are imagining a real live person behind his eyes.
True, for more advanced writers, third-person limited-omniscient has advantages over first person. Especially for characters with interesting thought processes (see the section on Level III Intelligence) where you may want to take a step back into greater omniscience and describe their thought processes in more detail. But first person, and the trick of self-insertion, is an excellent place to start when it comes to breaking the mental habit of writing Fiction Aliens.
One way or another, you have to live your character’s life for them to have a life; there is no brain but yours for them to borrow.