Creative Writing - What Happens When Your Character is More Creative Than You?

As a very prolific writer myself, I've often been asked by other writers to look over their manuscripts. Usually it's a close acquaintance which asks for assistance and they want me to let them know if anything jumps out at me. They want to make sure that as a critical reader I can spot the flaws in their continuity, in their characters, in their plot, or storyline. Then they want me to be quite frank and honest with them about where they've made mistakes, or where they can improve.

Now then, normally I don't like doing this because it's easy to hurt the author's feelings, but a creative writer must be able to take it in stride, or they're just never going to get a publisher to accept their work. And even if they do get their book gets published, it won't get very good reviews, and their feelings are going to get hurt in public, rather than in private. Not long ago, I was helping out an individual and I noted that they were quite creative in their own right, but they were writing a story, it was a novel, about a brilliant creative person.

Indeed, I could tell that they were trying to put themselves into the main character - however, the main character was literally at the Leonardo da Vinci plateau of creativity, innovation, and genius. They were struggling because they couldn't get into the character they were trying to write, and they were writing about themselves. I had to explain to them that although they were very creative in their own right, the character they had chosen is more creative than they are out in this real world.

And what I explained was that they needed to consider a multi-dimensional reality, where all the possibilities of everyone's life were playing out somewhere else in the universe. And if there was someone just like them, actually it was them, but they were in a different world and in that different world there were slightly different circumstances in how they were brought up, what they learned, what their hobbies were, and how they became to be this great inventor, innovator, and creative designer.

I was asking them to step outside themselves, and not re-create their character but hold themselves out of the character so they can adequately describe what was going on. I also suggested they go read a several books, one of them was "Profiles of Genius" and the other two were books on the biography of Benjamin Franklin, and the biography of Tesla.

Not many creative writer authors do a very good job of describing brilliant creative innovators, especially the ones that are at the top of the food chain and at the genus level. It's not that it can't be done, but it gets rather difficult if you try to make that main character one with your current reality. Please consider all this.

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