You send a lot of time defining and developing the, um, character of your characters — their strengths and weaknesses, their growth over time, how they think, and the ways they are shaped by their own actions, and the ways that their actions shape a plot.
We can’t talk about all of them in a single post (and aren’t you relieved?), so let me explore one class of characters: the ones who are subject-matter experts at something or other.
YMMV, but my take on these sorts of people comes partly from being cut from the same psychological cloth. While there may be mono-maniacs who only delve into one class of knowledge, like idiot savants, it’s more likely in my experience that they manifest various levels of knowledge, often in many domains.
For example, one major division is the fascination with how things are connected in any one area, versus the stand-alone knowledge of any particular factoid as a class. Children are eager to cultivate expertise in individual plastic dinosaur species, with a collector’s appetite, while adults can sink into a broad view of interrelated species succeeding each other over ages of time in a predictable progression.
Is the expert’s fascination in linguistics? Is it the breadth and sophisticated usage of a single tongue, or its development over time from earlier periods, or its relationship to other languages? Is it the particular language itself in which the expert is interested, or the way it relates to the language family, or the ways in which it differs from features of some other language?
In other words, there are knowledge experts who are details-oriented, or historical-development-oriented, or pride-oriented (competitively vs other experts) and so forth. Fascination may be narrowly focused, or as broad as the subject permits.
So, why do I care? Well, a main character may be an expert already when we meet him, or develop into one over the course of the story, or broaden/ deepen his initial interests. He may conflict with others in his area of expertise. He may run into other people who are far beyond him in their obsessions, and reflect upon the worth of his own preoccupations. He may gain insight into the mind of antagonists who share similar bodies of knowledge. Over time he may learn more, care less, profit from, overspend more, and discover there are many who are far better or worse than he is.
Obsession with details and the appreciation of inter-related systems are real character personality traits that manifest in lots of ways, married to other characteristics such as enthusiasm, frugality, prodigality, ruthless acquisition, despair in competition, and many others. Other characters will recognize the type when they see it, and understand how to work with it. A character who is an expert like this will understand how the parts of it that he cares about are inter-related, and can apply that structural-perception to other expertise domains, and the people who are involved in them.
Whether it’s an important character or a bit part, the type is a useful one to have in one’s toolbox.
I know the type from the inside myself, and there are typically significant and bit versions in the cast of my own books.
What about you, for this or any other sort of character psychology? What sorts of folks people your tales? Are they modeled on people close to you?
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “Experts as characters”
One character type I don’t think get used very much, and I really don’t understand how to work with are the conformists. Basically the people who value being part of the crowd, fitting in, more than pretty much anything else.
And I know people like this. But they don’t seem to show up in stories. I don’t know if they just don’t have the motivation to move stories forward, or if most authors aren’t that way. Heck, I don’t know if there even is a role for that sort of person in most stories beyond background characters or impediments, or if we should even care if they aren’t there in stories? Yet, there seem to be a lot of them in the world.
Some of that is because genre fiction tends to call for a person with exception good or bad qualities. Bilbo considered himself a stick-in-the-mud, but Gandalf recruited him as a burglar partly because he struck Gandalf as the kind of person who needs an adventure. We don’t hear that much about Dain of the Iron Hills compared to some of his kinsfolk, because he’s a common-sense kind of dwarf who lacks the traits that make Thorin and Balin set off to reclaim the Lonely Mountain and Balin then attempt to resettle Moria.
You do find conformists in literary fiction – the main character in Babbitt, for instance, or the cuckolded spouse in a lot of adultery fiction. You also see them as foils to the main characters in genre fiction, particularly dystopias. Sometimes you find conformists in Golden Age Mysteries, precisely because a conventional person who’s embarrassed themselves somewhere along the way is motivated to lie like a rug to cover it up, and maybe do worse things as well.
You might want to read the Warlock series by Daniel Kensington. The setting is a present-day witch college (all female: students, professors, staff, and the board of directors). All but a handful are 100% conformist. It makes a great clash of culture story.
The books are available on KU. Only the first 2 volumes have been published.
I’ve heard complaints that people have too much broad ranging knowledge. You get an expert in languages who can translate anything, instead of being able to guess and direct you to someone else based on the writing — and sometimes get it wrong. (Not to mention the ambiguities of translation.)
Also, observations that people should feel passionately about their subject.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/805511083382364626/
I also note that if you do a real-world expert there is the question of what facts you festoon his expertise with. Sherlock Holmes wrote Practical Handbook Of Bee Culture with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.
Segregating the queen had been known for decades at that point. I wonder whether Doyle just picked up a pretty fact, or whether it was something that was still permeating bee-keeping.
I don’t think the subtitle is meant to suggest that he invented or is popularizing segregation of the queen, just that he’s seen some interesting stuff related to the process and is sharing it with other beekeepers.
The early chapters in A Study in Scarlet, where Watson tries to figure out the unifying focus of his new roommate’s rather scattered intellectual interests (spoiler alert: he’s a private investigator with an emphasis on forensics), is something of a rebuttal to the idea of a “monomaniac” expert; no matter how narrow your focus is, other things will creep in.
Holmes’s narrowness is that he is interested only in things that would help him solve crimes.
“Whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth would make no difference to me or my work.”
I seem to recall that Doyle retconned that and gave Holmes some added awareness of astronomy. My headcanon was that he had to brush up on it after a crime required him to go undercover in a gathering of astronomers). 😉
Holmes became whatever level of expert he needed to be. I envy him that talent.
Holmes had an omnipotent author to aid him in gaining expertise. You just need to find one of your own.
I have One. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced His number.
I know, but my point is, look how far afield that narrowness takes him at times.
Good point — I recognize exactly what you mean.
I know why I don’t have them, but it’s not a comfortable admission to make. In story life, one comes up with what amount to NPC characters: petty tyrants of the administration, indifferent/subversive/obstructionist bureaucrats, class/status-conscious drones. I don’t think my readers care about the motives of any of these — they become clichés in the background, mere mechanisms for the plot as it goes by.
Of course, “my readers” is really often a euphemism for “me”. In a story plot, I am not made uncomfortable in not knowing the motivation of a background plot mechanism agent, as long as it doesn’t violate the typical behaviors of its class. Stereotypes exist for a reason and you don’t have to explain the ones who are unimportant to the cast.
However… in real life, when I meet the people upon whom the stereotypes are based, I am stymied. Limited intelligence or background knowledge/experience are simple to understand and accommodate. But anything that smacks of actual and deeply committed opinions on the part of the person’s appalling class beliefs and choices arouses aversive behavior on my part.
Of religious choices, I will not speak — to each his own. But when I look at the oblivious conformists around us today, I am confounded. I grew up in a mid-rank elite environment, and I understand its behaviors, expectations, pressures, and dislikes. It’s driven by status (social and monetary) and this genuinely breaks some members (criminal behavior, passivity, death). What I have never understood is why some of the in-born class members refuse the call to commitment to the class expectations on moral grounds. I don’t mean “embracing good causes (however ill-thought-out)”… I mean “This is an inadequate guidance for the life of a man who should make his significant choices based on “doing what’s right” rather than “doing what my class approves of.”
Of course, as soon as a class member makes that transition, he’s no longer a bit player — he has an interesting story of his own which can be queried and examined, something you can’t do for a class clone. (Well, maybe Dostoevsky…)
It does not escape me that “doing what’s right” requires a religious or at least a philosophical underpinning, and I am personally divorced from those particular formal crutches. Nonetheless, healthy cultures have a way, via traditional and family tales as well as formal religious practices, of imbuing their own progeny with a set of approved/disapproved behaviors that amount to “understanding what is right to do.” Unhealthy cultures have failed to do that, in various different ways.
All of this is a long route to saying: I don’t understand people who are content leading the unexamined moral life as long as they can (hope to) achieve status group approval. It’s not that they make the wrong choice, necessarily (they may mean well), it’s that they don’t make a choice at all, outside the group. They don’t think they need to examine the choices, just follow the group’s choices. I find that weighting of values repellent, as if they are cowards who refuse the call because they are unwilling to even hear it. I made different conscious and explicit choices in my own life by 5th grade even as an atheist, and I’m not impressed by people who have never made (or even thought about) those choices. I don’t respect them enough to bother arguing with them
Villains are repellent, but at least they are conscious of the choices they are making, and they can be understood in story life and in person (even if I avoid them when I can.) The current crop of conformists are in part driven by (led by) people I do consider out-and-out villains. That’s a story plot worth telling.
So, from my limited experience in dealing with them, it is not so much that they made no choice (though there are professional fence sitters) but more, they made a choice that harmony with their group has a higher value than anything else.
And yes, it does bother me on a fundamental level. Most other root values I can understand, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them. I don’t have a good theory of mind of them.
From what I’ve seen, there are two explanations of why people are like that:
-they don’t have the mental energy to spare on analyzing such issues. Keeping ahead of the conflicting demands imposed on them in their formative years (by parents, teachers, and peers) and then just surviving in whatever line of work they fetch up in as adults, takes everything they’ve got, and if they have anything left over it’s going to go into positive stimulus like entertainment or hobbies (or less wholesome sources of dopamine hits, like brigading on social media), not into asking questions with uncomfortable answers.
-They aren’t that interested in themselves, so sitting around thinking about whether they reeeally agree with the conventional wisdom is not their idea of a good time.
And frankly, I don’t care whether the firemen in my area are sturdy individualists or followers of the Current Thing, as long as neither their values nor their physical condition stops them from carrying people out of burning buildings.