Sesc nailed it exactly. It's the same reason you can't write a more intelligent character than you are yourself - the only thing you can do is make them appear more intelligent by dint of prior knowledge, which is a terribad writing technique.

All that being said, I find it difficult to understand how it's possible to write so badly. Letters aren't written exactly like emails, but they're close enough, so anybody with any experience in formal communication should be able to write a decent letter. As for newspaper articles, it really isn't that difficult to imitate the style of canon.

 

I don't think this is true at all. It's like saying that you as a writer can't write about something with which you have no firsthand experience. That statement is also false.

Edit: Also, Sesc, I just looked at Poison Pen just because of your comments about it - and I got really, really depressed.

 

The things I hate the most would have to be lack of spell variety I honestly dont give a fuck if he uses light or dark magic just look how badass Dumbledore is. I don't mind light bashing but you have to do it fairly.

 

In some ways it makes sense for Harry, if you stick close to canon, to use a limited selection of spells. They are the spells he knows will work and do the job he needs done. He neither has the broad experience of magic needed to have the attitude that all spells will work for him, nor does he have a particularly wide ranging experience of spells themselves. He knows most of what is taught in Hogwarts. Little of that will actually have combat relevance, and of what does, how much did he actually retain from class? I always pictured Harry as somewhat struggling and stumbling his way through his practical classes as well as his theory. So if he can't cast a spell well and reliably in a class room setting he is not going to attempt it in combat unless it has a really specialised purpose and he requires just that effect.

Of course, if you start to divert from canon you get plenty of excuses for him to learn a wider variety of combat useful spells.

 

What? How can you write somebody more intelligent than you? You can't. You can make them appear more intelligent because you have time to think about the decisions they may have to make in a split-second, or because, as I said, you can give them knowledge they aren't supposed to have, but... yeah.

 

So what's the difference between how intelligent a character appears and how intelligent he actually is? As far as writing is concerned, I'd day there's no difference at all.

Again, if what you say is true, I as a male shouldn't be able to write female interactions at all - because I don't have any clue how they think and how they might naturally react to various situations. Would you say that's correct? Shit, I mean - in real life I've written a play about honor killings in Palestine. I'm white and from Iowa/New York. This play has been produced and been generally well received. According to you, this shouldn't be possible.

@Sesc - yeah, what you say is true. If you're a competent writer, the characters relative intelligence should never be an inhibiting factor. But t3t seems to be arguing that, no matter what, I can't write about someone who is at all smarter than I am.

 

No, that's not quite what I mean, but looking back I can see that's what I said. What I meant was that you can't create and resolve situations in your writing that you aren't intelligent enough to create/resolve in real life. So while you can make your characters appear smart in a limited sense, you can't give them more difficult problems to solve - those that actually make sense and don't have giant plot holes, that is.

Speaking of which, I rarely include female characters in important roles in my writing. Out of all the women I know in my life, there's only one I feel I understand how she thinks, and that's because she thinks like a guy (or, rather, expresses her thoughts in such a manner that I am familiar with). Most females are a mystery to me, so I'm not insulting my readers by pretending to understand their motivations. While I can write about their actions based on past experience, I've had trouble putting them in roles that influence the plot heavily because I don't know what they'd do in certain situations.

 

@Zennith

It's not really true that just because you have no experienced something personally, you cannot gain any knowledge of what the interaction could or should be like. As readers, it is likely we have read such interactions in other works of literature. With that, a basis have probably already formed in a good writer's mind and could be used and further developed in their own stories.

Also, I think the difference between "appearing" intelligent rather than being smart would be how consistent their behaviors are. An incompetent writer would leave flaws or plot holes that contradicts the character's supposed intelligence. An intelligent reader that picks up on these would probably find it repulsive. While those that are less so would leave a review saying "Great chapter, more please!"

I believe the worse scenario comes when a writer cannot make their main character more intelligent, and improvise by making all the surrounding characters ridiculously stupid.

 

Yes... like Sesc mentioned, the retarded Manipulative!Dumbledore's that plague indy!Harry fics. They're so mind-bogglingly stupid because the authors probably can't think of a way for Harry to outmaneuver them if they were actually smart (though I suspect it's because they're lazy too).

 

Legit. I don't fully agree, but what you say here certainly makes much more sense - it's certainly difficult to write someone more intelligent than you. That's certain.

@tragicmat -

Honest to god, I have no idea what you're arguing here.

 

Its perfectly possible to write someone as being more intelligent than you yourself are. One of the most important facets of intelligence in books, particularly in stories like manipulative!Dumbledore, is the characters ability to think quickly. It doesn't matter if you, the author, could not come up with a solution on the spot, or find the problem with but a moments thought. You have as long as you need, as many diagrams, walls covered in post-it notes and as many long conversations with your alpha/beta readers as you need to find the solution. Your character can then come up with it immediately, showing them as brilliantly intelligent...

Similarly you can show someone with excellent combat instincts even if you yourself don't have them, because you can take your time to think through their actions, where they in the story only have the time to react by instinct.

 

Haha, yeah, there the problem is two-fold. First, they have to make Dumbledore deviously intelligent. Then they need to make Harry even smarter still. If you can't accomplish the first, there's no way in hell you'll make it to the second. End result is you have a Harry who is average (author intelligence) a Dumbledore who is mentally challenged (just a bit dumber than the author) and the remaining cast who are dumber than a box of rocks.

 

I think there are writers like Submarauder for instance where you have doubts about their "intelligence" because you assume they write like you think a good writer should proceed but completely fail in doing so.

But I think these people aren't able to create fresh/new/logical plots and characters because they approach the story writing process completely different. These people see stories and character behaviors like textures/patterns and what they do in their work is just permute previously seen patterns to construct their story. And their quality is measured more in how seamless these textures fit together.

The painful question is, are they really wrong? If you look at certain TV, music and books productions you can see that they are usually built, or call it "engineered" in a similar way. Sure, if that approach should be successful you need to have the intuition/experience skills, in short term "taste", to produce something to match "current" consumer's "taste".

They don't really think about character perspectives and motivations at all and therefore don't really "see" how stupid these creation and stories are perceived by "intelligent" readers/writers which don't think in such pattern but more in causality terms I suppose. Maybe they can also think differently but it's just a matter of time so they chose not to.

 

So annoying! Gah!

 

Petpeeve: It's always Hermione in the bathroom. It always her, in that same bloody bathroom that the troll oh-so-happens to come across. It's ridiculous how many fics, AU or not, can have lots of different events happen prior to this point but Ron is still mean to Hermione, she cries and runs off to bathroom.

It's even worse when she actually dies. It seems a completely unnecessary way of preventing her from being involved in the story and rarely has any actual purpose behind it.

 

There are plenty of good reasons for her to die, actually.

 

Oops, I suppose I'm guilty of this. Sometime's it can be a lot of fun to one line kill major canon characters.

Keeps people on their toes.

 

Sal Paradise, master of the abrupt. Lol.

 

An odd one that's been bugging me lately, when multiple people combine to write someone (usually Harry) a letter, usually complete with switching perspectives midway through.

An example I found today when out of a strange sense of Nostalgia, I went back and read the first few chapters of Earl of the North.

I've seen it in several other fics, though tbh this is by far the worst example I've seen in a while. This fic did not age well, I liked it back in '05.