The original Mission Impossible was the first show I sae where I realized that the draw *was* watching extremely skilled people be extremely skilled. And the show knew it because the moment-to-moment drama came from near misses and unexpected complications and watching them deftly improvise.
I find this kind of extreme competence really satisfying if the art focuses on the details of how they accomplish the task. To the point if being one part training manual.
I tend to like to write these kinds of characters too, but I also like to make sure that the thing they're competent in is *not* the thing that will most directly lead them to their goal in the story. The main character of my novel is a very effective demon hunter and investigator, and only gets more so as he gains more training and experience. But that competence often backfires against his ultimate goals as he finds himself in the employ of people with questionable ambitions, in conflict with those he holds dear, and in constant danger of injury and death.
Put another way: he's really good at what he does, but sometimes he regrets doing it.
I actually replied to this in a note where someone shared your article and I wish I had copied the text now. It seems that where YA has gone wrong with their highly competent female character is that they come across as stupid? Having not read a whole lot of YA, I wonder if the authorial struggle is between wanting to create their fantasy character vs the way society wants them to be (pretty airheads that need to be coddled — basically have things handed to them as you described). If they are too competent, nobody (especially the reader) will like them. But there are examples of this highly competent female character done well, yes? It’s just everyone wants a piece of that pie and doesn’t quite have the chops to pull it off?
Firefly has several highly competent women. Zoe is a no-nonsense warrior, Kailee is cute and fluffy but a top-tier mechanic, Inara is very good at manipulating and navigating the social scene. They're all done mostly well except for the occasional Whedon-ism, which is less bad than a lot of his stuff and way less bad than those who want to be him.
It's hard to pull off convincing competence when you haven't spent time around competent people. I always recommend writers who want to understand this world go on police ride-alongs and read things like Band of Brothers or lots of military SF. If you have lived in a very soft-handed world, you don't know what people with hard-won calluses are actually like, you need to learn, which is easier than ever.
I have given characters massive skills in some of my books. Elswyth in The Wistful and the Good is a brilliant Lady of the Hall, able to charm any man. Hilda in The Needle of Avocation is the finest needlewoman in Northumbria. Isabel in Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight becomes a peerless warrior while under enchantment. But in each case, it is not these skills that save the day. Rather, they are, in each case, a stumbling block and a cause of misery and wrongdoing, not only for the character but for those around them. Competence, in other words, comes before a fall, and it is other virtues that save the day.
There is a long history of this type of story structure in Western literature. Sir Gawain finds all his military skills useless against the magic of the Green Knight, who, when Gawain chops his head off, rides off with it under his arm. It is Gawain's heroic chastity in resisting the seduction of the Green Knight's lady that saves his life.
This turn from virtue to competence in stories is, I think, one of the great shifts in Western storytelling. House is the perfect example of a story that sets virtue at nothing and places competence above all.
I think, though, that men's desire for competence, which is certainly real, is a product of men's desire to be relied upon. Men wish to be relied upon by their wives, their children, their captains, and their kings. Competence is a tool with which you can win that trust. Women perhaps want that too, but a woman has only to conceive a child to have someone who will rely on them utterly and without question. Men have to win that trust. Women have only to give birth to it.
"Competence is a tool with which you can win that trust. Women perhaps want that too, but a woman has only to conceive a child to have someone who will rely on them utterly and without question." *shudder* I've seen women who thought that win nothing but sorrow for all parties more than once.
Oh, well, being relied upon does not always end happily for men or women. Not being relied upon by anyone, however, seems to be an even more miserable state.
I mean the idea that just because you gave birth to someone means you don’t have a responsibility to do thing in order to keep the trust that comes with that; the font of mommy issues.
Also, it is very correct that it's a men's power fantasy to have hyper competence in some skillset. You see this in the sorts of video games and other media. Though it's also the buildup to competence that has a draw. Many adventurers start off as rookies with nothing but their wits, and grow into captains and kings or whatever else they are aiming for. Having all that gained by birthright is just... dull.
I like to write both idiots and geniuses, so that this is a really interesting essay; in a lot of ways I think I wrote a bunch of idiots in SSM, and even Olympnomachi but in Gemstone a genius or three.
This was a great article, really loved this analysis of yours.
My hero in "The Jester" is a young man who has learned to do many things well, but none of them satisfy him. It takes a new problem that he is recruited to help fix that points the way to what he does best. He spends a lot of time thinking that he's a failure, but he doggedly continues until he solves the problem--and the puzzle of himself. I tend to like Everyman characters who ultimately shine when push comes to shove.
Another good, well written, skillful character that springs to mind is Mitch Rapp in the books written by Vince Flynn. He was a very focused character, being right up in much of the national security action that seemed to happen every few months or years. If you ran across him in the street, he'd probably have an aura of danger about him. A number of other characters were much the same.
I tend to write in that borderline YA/adult fantasy, and trying to figure out the skills of my characters is important. Just sometimes a bit hard to figure out "alright, is this plausible? How and what skills is a nobleman's daughter really going to possess?"
To me, the main thing is for the character's level of skill and competency to be relevant to the plot, or at least relevant to the character's personality. If a character is described as being good at everything, but only to make them sound generally cool or likeable rather than these skills actually being used in the story or relevant to character development -- that's what gets boring.
In my fantasy / action comic, my main characters are better than average at fighting -- with or without extra powers to enhance their abilities -- due to previous training or experience as secret agents, mercenaries, etc. It's not realistic to the average person, but a story about an average person either getting curb-stomped by bad guys, OR getting new skills out of absolutely nowhere, would not work for this genre!
On the other hand, in earlier drafts, I had my main protagonist Ace Rocket described in flashback as "the best sharpshooter" but in the actual plot, at least in the early story arcs, he misses at close distances at inopportune times! So I had to fix that, he's more like "good but not great" and "better at the academy practice range than in real life" which is... actually fitting for his personality anyway.
I have a thing for redemption arcs. Galaxy's most wanted is all about a criminal slowly becoming the commander of an Armada. And somehow in the bargain saving the galaxy. That said, I do like to give my heroes learning curves. I think there's something to be said about a hero having one or two decent competencies, and then having to learn the rest.
In the series I'm plotting now, the main hero character is a near do well, lay about e-4 mafia member, who will suddenly find himself in charge of a group of survivors. He's never led anybody in his life. He's got amazing technical skills, and a bunch of other military skills that he learned before he even joined thanks to his crazy father. But lead others? To be responsible for them? Absolute spine-shattering bone liquefying terror.
Competence isn't enough. The problem has to be hard even for the competent. Hercules Poirot is a genius with decades of experience at solving crimes. But if he isn't stumped by some detail for part of the story, it looks too easy. He often spends time beating himself up for not getting it sooner (even though no one else got it at all).
Poirot is, in Christie's words a bombastic, fussy little man. His personality is hard to like. But his genius is hard not to love.
I've got a theory that how tolerable a highly competent protagonist is depends on the genre and type of story. If your story has a coming-of-age sort of structure, a main character who is good or gifted in an area that makes sense (i.e. Luke Skywalker is good at piloting in canyons because that's what the bored farm kids do to hunt varmints back home and he dreams of being a pilot so he's educated himself), but one who is at professional levels at everything for no reason is intolerable (i.e. Rey with the lightsaber beating Kylo Ren when she picked one up a day before while he's been training his whole life).
But if you're writing a story with professional adults- military SF or medical dramas- characters being very good at many things make sense. There's a complaint that Veta Lopis from the Halo Ferrets books is a Mary Sue, but she's a grown adult woman who has plenty of reason to be a hot-shot detective and has the gumption that comes with living a life that has not been easy. She's not a 20-something ingenue; she's late 30s/early 40s former law enforcement. She certainly takes losses due to events bigger than her, she just can handle herself in her world well because professional adults have gone through the hard part of learning those skills before the story.
You can avoid Mary Sue-ing a character if you just treat them like a person who lives their world, not a costume to put on, if that makes sense. It's more fun, too.
Heh, true. Jotaro is socially awkward and distant, even in his own season. And he needs help to win multiple times. He's endeared to the audience in his reason for going on the quest though: His mother will die if he doesn't, so he can't say no anymore.
Arguably, Johnathan Joestar is even more perfect, but he's got an idiot for a father and he's almost too trusting.
Regarding "competent at too many things" - A complaint Ringo got about the protagonist of his looking glass books was "noone is that competent."
Small problem - the protag was modeled in part on real life Travis Taylor, who indeed had multiple PHDs, etc., or as Ringo put it, "unlike the character, already knew how to shoot a gun."
If anything , Travis, who also had the show on NatGeo called Rocket City Rednecks, was one of those guys so scarily competent at enough things you wondered if he could tie his shoelaces.
There is a storytelling style, and in this context, the typical shadow story, or Batman if you prefer, or the Lone Ranger, where the “main character“ doesn’t really have a character arc. He simply is, a force of nature, he comes in, shit happens.Think pale rider perhaps as well. The real story, the character arcs, and the changes, happened to everybody around them.
Most often these days we see that in horror, movies or disaster movies.
It’s all about tension. A too-competent character is like playing a FPS with an invulnerability hack - you might enjoy the feeling of power but there’s nothing for the audience to engage with. So someone has to move outside their comfort zone and learn / discover / achieve during the course of the story
I find the Christian gospels a fascinating inversion of this trope. The main character is unashamedly portrayed as perfection incarnate. So how do you tell an interesting story? By connecting the audience with “everyone else”. The gospels are not just about Jesus, but about how all the various people he interacts with trying to understand what is going on
Writing advice that has stuck in my head: if you tell the audience the plan, it must suffer complications. If you want the characters to be supremely competent and brilliantly execute a flawless plan, then the audience can only see it as it unfolds
Right, that's what the complaints about Marry Sues are. Here's a character that has everything given to them, has plot armor, and is perfect in every way. Why doesn't anyone like them?
I had to chuckle at the Voice of Power reference because as much as I love that series I scream at the book when the female MC can barely solve her problems lol.
I’ve always loved the idea of playing with competence. What if the character is really competent but in way too specific an area? How do you solve general problems with a specialized skill set?
My current project is a vignette-based story (like World War Z, it’s a collection of chronologically ordered small accounts from a ton of different people). Inevitably, some of those vignettes are going to have to have whoever the viewpoint character is fail at the end, which is usually unsatisfying. How do you give them enough of a win within that failure to make it still satisfying? How can their competency mitigate the failure in the moment?
Incredibly interesting aspect of writing that I don’t think authors consider enough. Mary Sue-dom abounds.
The original Mission Impossible was the first show I sae where I realized that the draw *was* watching extremely skilled people be extremely skilled. And the show knew it because the moment-to-moment drama came from near misses and unexpected complications and watching them deftly improvise.
I find this kind of extreme competence really satisfying if the art focuses on the details of how they accomplish the task. To the point if being one part training manual.
I tend to like to write these kinds of characters too, but I also like to make sure that the thing they're competent in is *not* the thing that will most directly lead them to their goal in the story. The main character of my novel is a very effective demon hunter and investigator, and only gets more so as he gains more training and experience. But that competence often backfires against his ultimate goals as he finds himself in the employ of people with questionable ambitions, in conflict with those he holds dear, and in constant danger of injury and death.
Put another way: he's really good at what he does, but sometimes he regrets doing it.
I actually replied to this in a note where someone shared your article and I wish I had copied the text now. It seems that where YA has gone wrong with their highly competent female character is that they come across as stupid? Having not read a whole lot of YA, I wonder if the authorial struggle is between wanting to create their fantasy character vs the way society wants them to be (pretty airheads that need to be coddled — basically have things handed to them as you described). If they are too competent, nobody (especially the reader) will like them. But there are examples of this highly competent female character done well, yes? It’s just everyone wants a piece of that pie and doesn’t quite have the chops to pull it off?
Firefly has several highly competent women. Zoe is a no-nonsense warrior, Kailee is cute and fluffy but a top-tier mechanic, Inara is very good at manipulating and navigating the social scene. They're all done mostly well except for the occasional Whedon-ism, which is less bad than a lot of his stuff and way less bad than those who want to be him.
It's hard to pull off convincing competence when you haven't spent time around competent people. I always recommend writers who want to understand this world go on police ride-alongs and read things like Band of Brothers or lots of military SF. If you have lived in a very soft-handed world, you don't know what people with hard-won calluses are actually like, you need to learn, which is easier than ever.
Exactly, lots of genres have this issue. Competence or intelligence is hard to imagine if you've never seen it.
I have given characters massive skills in some of my books. Elswyth in The Wistful and the Good is a brilliant Lady of the Hall, able to charm any man. Hilda in The Needle of Avocation is the finest needlewoman in Northumbria. Isabel in Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight becomes a peerless warrior while under enchantment. But in each case, it is not these skills that save the day. Rather, they are, in each case, a stumbling block and a cause of misery and wrongdoing, not only for the character but for those around them. Competence, in other words, comes before a fall, and it is other virtues that save the day.
There is a long history of this type of story structure in Western literature. Sir Gawain finds all his military skills useless against the magic of the Green Knight, who, when Gawain chops his head off, rides off with it under his arm. It is Gawain's heroic chastity in resisting the seduction of the Green Knight's lady that saves his life.
This turn from virtue to competence in stories is, I think, one of the great shifts in Western storytelling. House is the perfect example of a story that sets virtue at nothing and places competence above all.
I think, though, that men's desire for competence, which is certainly real, is a product of men's desire to be relied upon. Men wish to be relied upon by their wives, their children, their captains, and their kings. Competence is a tool with which you can win that trust. Women perhaps want that too, but a woman has only to conceive a child to have someone who will rely on them utterly and without question. Men have to win that trust. Women have only to give birth to it.
"Competence is a tool with which you can win that trust. Women perhaps want that too, but a woman has only to conceive a child to have someone who will rely on them utterly and without question." *shudder* I've seen women who thought that win nothing but sorrow for all parties more than once.
Oh, well, being relied upon does not always end happily for men or women. Not being relied upon by anyone, however, seems to be an even more miserable state.
I mean the idea that just because you gave birth to someone means you don’t have a responsibility to do thing in order to keep the trust that comes with that; the font of mommy issues.
Also, it is very correct that it's a men's power fantasy to have hyper competence in some skillset. You see this in the sorts of video games and other media. Though it's also the buildup to competence that has a draw. Many adventurers start off as rookies with nothing but their wits, and grow into captains and kings or whatever else they are aiming for. Having all that gained by birthright is just... dull.
I like to write both idiots and geniuses, so that this is a really interesting essay; in a lot of ways I think I wrote a bunch of idiots in SSM, and even Olympnomachi but in Gemstone a genius or three.
This was a great article, really loved this analysis of yours.
My hero in "The Jester" is a young man who has learned to do many things well, but none of them satisfy him. It takes a new problem that he is recruited to help fix that points the way to what he does best. He spends a lot of time thinking that he's a failure, but he doggedly continues until he solves the problem--and the puzzle of himself. I tend to like Everyman characters who ultimately shine when push comes to shove.
Another good, well written, skillful character that springs to mind is Mitch Rapp in the books written by Vince Flynn. He was a very focused character, being right up in much of the national security action that seemed to happen every few months or years. If you ran across him in the street, he'd probably have an aura of danger about him. A number of other characters were much the same.
I tend to write in that borderline YA/adult fantasy, and trying to figure out the skills of my characters is important. Just sometimes a bit hard to figure out "alright, is this plausible? How and what skills is a nobleman's daughter really going to possess?"
To me, the main thing is for the character's level of skill and competency to be relevant to the plot, or at least relevant to the character's personality. If a character is described as being good at everything, but only to make them sound generally cool or likeable rather than these skills actually being used in the story or relevant to character development -- that's what gets boring.
In my fantasy / action comic, my main characters are better than average at fighting -- with or without extra powers to enhance their abilities -- due to previous training or experience as secret agents, mercenaries, etc. It's not realistic to the average person, but a story about an average person either getting curb-stomped by bad guys, OR getting new skills out of absolutely nowhere, would not work for this genre!
On the other hand, in earlier drafts, I had my main protagonist Ace Rocket described in flashback as "the best sharpshooter" but in the actual plot, at least in the early story arcs, he misses at close distances at inopportune times! So I had to fix that, he's more like "good but not great" and "better at the academy practice range than in real life" which is... actually fitting for his personality anyway.
I have a thing for redemption arcs. Galaxy's most wanted is all about a criminal slowly becoming the commander of an Armada. And somehow in the bargain saving the galaxy. That said, I do like to give my heroes learning curves. I think there's something to be said about a hero having one or two decent competencies, and then having to learn the rest.
In the series I'm plotting now, the main hero character is a near do well, lay about e-4 mafia member, who will suddenly find himself in charge of a group of survivors. He's never led anybody in his life. He's got amazing technical skills, and a bunch of other military skills that he learned before he even joined thanks to his crazy father. But lead others? To be responsible for them? Absolute spine-shattering bone liquefying terror.
Competence isn't enough. The problem has to be hard even for the competent. Hercules Poirot is a genius with decades of experience at solving crimes. But if he isn't stumped by some detail for part of the story, it looks too easy. He often spends time beating himself up for not getting it sooner (even though no one else got it at all).
Poirot is, in Christie's words a bombastic, fussy little man. His personality is hard to like. But his genius is hard not to love.
Columbo too. He's got to spend the whole episode finding the right information and "Just one more thing..." to solve the case.
I've got a theory that how tolerable a highly competent protagonist is depends on the genre and type of story. If your story has a coming-of-age sort of structure, a main character who is good or gifted in an area that makes sense (i.e. Luke Skywalker is good at piloting in canyons because that's what the bored farm kids do to hunt varmints back home and he dreams of being a pilot so he's educated himself), but one who is at professional levels at everything for no reason is intolerable (i.e. Rey with the lightsaber beating Kylo Ren when she picked one up a day before while he's been training his whole life).
But if you're writing a story with professional adults- military SF or medical dramas- characters being very good at many things make sense. There's a complaint that Veta Lopis from the Halo Ferrets books is a Mary Sue, but she's a grown adult woman who has plenty of reason to be a hot-shot detective and has the gumption that comes with living a life that has not been easy. She's not a 20-something ingenue; she's late 30s/early 40s former law enforcement. She certainly takes losses due to events bigger than her, she just can handle herself in her world well because professional adults have gone through the hard part of learning those skills before the story.
You can avoid Mary Sue-ing a character if you just treat them like a person who lives their world, not a costume to put on, if that makes sense. It's more fun, too.
How did you just not mention Jotaro Kujo in this article (Jojos bizzare adventure part 3/season 2)
Heh, true. Jotaro is socially awkward and distant, even in his own season. And he needs help to win multiple times. He's endeared to the audience in his reason for going on the quest though: His mother will die if he doesn't, so he can't say no anymore.
Arguably, Johnathan Joestar is even more perfect, but he's got an idiot for a father and he's almost too trusting.
Regarding "competent at too many things" - A complaint Ringo got about the protagonist of his looking glass books was "noone is that competent."
Small problem - the protag was modeled in part on real life Travis Taylor, who indeed had multiple PHDs, etc., or as Ringo put it, "unlike the character, already knew how to shoot a gun."
If anything , Travis, who also had the show on NatGeo called Rocket City Rednecks, was one of those guys so scarily competent at enough things you wondered if he could tie his shoelaces.
There is a storytelling style, and in this context, the typical shadow story, or Batman if you prefer, or the Lone Ranger, where the “main character“ doesn’t really have a character arc. He simply is, a force of nature, he comes in, shit happens.Think pale rider perhaps as well. The real story, the character arcs, and the changes, happened to everybody around them.
Most often these days we see that in horror, movies or disaster movies.
It’s all about tension. A too-competent character is like playing a FPS with an invulnerability hack - you might enjoy the feeling of power but there’s nothing for the audience to engage with. So someone has to move outside their comfort zone and learn / discover / achieve during the course of the story
I find the Christian gospels a fascinating inversion of this trope. The main character is unashamedly portrayed as perfection incarnate. So how do you tell an interesting story? By connecting the audience with “everyone else”. The gospels are not just about Jesus, but about how all the various people he interacts with trying to understand what is going on
Writing advice that has stuck in my head: if you tell the audience the plan, it must suffer complications. If you want the characters to be supremely competent and brilliantly execute a flawless plan, then the audience can only see it as it unfolds
Right, that's what the complaints about Marry Sues are. Here's a character that has everything given to them, has plot armor, and is perfect in every way. Why doesn't anyone like them?
I had to chuckle at the Voice of Power reference because as much as I love that series I scream at the book when the female MC can barely solve her problems lol.
I’ve always loved the idea of playing with competence. What if the character is really competent but in way too specific an area? How do you solve general problems with a specialized skill set?
My current project is a vignette-based story (like World War Z, it’s a collection of chronologically ordered small accounts from a ton of different people). Inevitably, some of those vignettes are going to have to have whoever the viewpoint character is fail at the end, which is usually unsatisfying. How do you give them enough of a win within that failure to make it still satisfying? How can their competency mitigate the failure in the moment?
Incredibly interesting aspect of writing that I don’t think authors consider enough. Mary Sue-dom abounds.