You are Counting on You—On Smart Characters

Disclaimer: my thoughts, this is only definitively true about me, there are exceptions, yadda yadda.

You wake up one morning with a pounding headache and the knowledge that you were just sent back in time, and that it was you who did it. All other future knowledge has been wiped from your mind. What do you do?

Well, something must have gone wrong if you had to send yourself back in time with no way to know what you had to do. The situation must have been desperate, something that would cause you to send yourself back in the slim hope you did something different. You have to prepare for whatever lies ahead. At the extreme end of things, you might rob the company you work at, go undercover, and bribe your way to Mars. Maybe you'll take some time to look at the news for problems that might be surfacing, or head to the nearest bunker in preparation for nuclear war, or get ahold of the NSA and tell them it's probably aliens.

Of course, there's a way to cheat. But we can take this hypothetical and use it as a tool to make smart characters act like themselves.

Twilight's investigating reports of ponies becoming apathetic and dull for days after visiting a small part of town. If she doesn't have agency, an author might trot her to the reported location, scanning the place for magical anomalies that might be causing a sapping of emotional energy. Of course, as soon as she steps inside a nearby house, she's mobbed by changelings and taken captive so Starlight Glimmer or Orion Comet can go save the day.

But hold on a minute. Twilight's smart. Even socially-inept episode one Twilight isn't weak; she's widely read, massively powerful for a unicorn, and inexperienced enough that she'll notice discrepancies in a pony's cover story and poke holes in it until the poor mare she's been grilling leaves Ponyville forever, never to return that overdue book. She might not understand ponies very well at this point, but she understands logic. So what are the chances that any version of Twilight would simply walk up to this strange part of town without at least minimal preparation?

Whenever I feel like I'm putting characters on tracks and pushing them where I want them to go, I'll try to ping them. Something went wrong in the future—think. With a small ping, she might prepare a variety of shielding spells and maybe one or two offensive ones, and maybe bring along Rainbow Dash as backup. If I decide to give her a major ping, a massive something's wrong, prepare yourself alarm that goes off in her head, she'll hole up somewhere safe with all her friends, send a letter to the Princess—no, both Princesses, and the head of the guard, and her brother, and Discord if he's friendly, and she'll spend hours upon hours layering defensive spells over their hideout until the royalty arrives.

Most of my pings are on the small side, minor common-sense vaccines to make sure I'm not making the characters do something monumentally stupid. Twilight just going off on her own to investigate emotion-affecting powers? Without even a teleportation spell prepared if things happen to go south? I don't think so. Even if Twilight doesn't immediately jump to changelings! she was raised around magic. She'll know proper procedures for investigating strange magical artifacts, especially with Equestria's likelihood of said artifacts being mind-controlling zombie-creating horrors from a thousand years ago, and she will follow procedure with a checklist.

But what if the character you're writing isn't Twilight? Fair enough, not everyone is as smart as her. But every one of the main six characters of the show, and Spike for that matter, is smart in some ways. They won't necessarily think that the scratches on the door that appeared in the middle of the night match a set that appears in an ancient book on windigos that they read five years ago, but if you give them a massive ping they will contact the castle and warn everypony in Ponyville that something's off. They might even tell Twilight, who will think of that ancient book when she sees the marks on the door.

This isn't just about making characters appear smarter; there are guides for that. This post is mostly about making characters be themselves. To set off a ping in a character's head, you have to know enough about that character that you can predict how they'd react to the knowledge that they'd just sent themselves back in time. Take Rainbow Dash: her smarts lie mostly in the realm of the tactician. She'll know the exact formation needed to break through the charging cavalry, and if you give her a big ping she'll signal a retreat and tell the army to be on the lookout for something. She won't think to poison the enemy's water supply, raze their fields, and disperse agents throughout the ranks of her own army to weed out and kill the infiltrators who are obviously there unless the Rainbow Dash you're writing has a lot more experience than the canon one or the other strategic possibilities are pointed out to her. She loses the forest for the trees, but she can chop down that tree really well. I can't give Random Background Unicorn #32 a ping because I don't know her. I don't know what she'd do. I could fix that easily, but then I'd have to define her, give her a personality and a background.

If you can give characters pings, you don't just make them smart, you make them live. They don't care about your precious plot. They'll knock it down and burrow through it and fly over it because no matter how meticulously you craft it, at some point they'll look at it and think that's stupid and the reason everypony went down that huge hole in the ground will make no sense and you'll have to do something else, because no one's that stupid and if by chance you find or create a character who is, everyone else will point it out to them.

But how do you cheat in the first scenario? As Pinkie might tell you, the secret is to be random.

Crossposted to The Writer's Group.