Writing psychological combat vs physical combat

Ah, I love intrigue like this though I'm probably better reading it than writing it.

My first question is what your primary type of combat is. You mentioned having characters capable of physical combat. Well, if the primary focus of the story is on them then you don't need to go as in depth with the intrigue.

I'd recommend Full Metal Alchemist as an example. In particular either the manga or Brotherhood. In it moments of intrigue such as Maes Hughes death or the sabotage of the big circle at the end serve primarily to facilitate more physical confrontation than standing on their own. The first serves as a major character motivator and the second gives the good guys a chance to take out the bad guys.

 

Hmm, for some reason I envision the old Michael Ironside movie Scanners, heh heh. Pop goes the head... but anyhow, these sorts of characters can be tricky unless you have an affinity for such things yourself. But, you do have the advantage of setting up the scenarios the character has to crack. It’s like watching The Mentalist, he does things at a level impossible without having read the script, and he always has that little explanation to make us feel good about the story.

One really good way to convey characters like this is to NOT be in their POV, Watson to Sherlock Holmes. The masterminds are dangerous to write. In Sundering the Gods I have one chapter that follows a character (but through the eyes of his targets, rather than through his vantage) as he manipulates and murders his way to a position of leverage over an entire kingdom. Written from his POV? The reader would know too much. So, transitioning POVs to tell another character’s story was what worked. It’s also important to consider this as well when these masterminds make things work without a hitch. If we knew the totality of Holmes’ or Jane’s plans, watching them unfold isn’t as interesting. This is a strength of the sidekick POV.

Every situation has a best potential answer, the trouble is finding it. My best guess without knowing your tale is that you need to work backwards, meaning you need to know exactly what the character needs to do in order to find out how they’re going to achieve it. From there, beat yourself up trying to figure out how best to tell the story.

 

You can do this when writing in their point of view, but the trick is not to give away too much of their thought processes. Think of characters like Sam Spade or the Continental Op (both by Dashiell Hammett), or maybe some of Gavin Lyall's characters. If you do it this way you need to strike a balance between revealing enough information for the reader to be able to follow (and maybe work out for themselves) what is going on whilst not revealing everything your character thinks or does. Personally I'd have the character make mistakes, misjudge people and situations etc, so that the character doesn't appear to be all-knowing.

 

Not exactly, my answer is whatever works, heh heh. From what I read, I take it the assassins/psych characters are not POV? And the mage and others are suspicious of them. It sounds like a situation ripe for building that same distrust in the reader with only sporadic explanations. Maybe even make readers distrust their motivations or allegiances at some point. But, I don’t know enough for real suggestions, just enough to throw generalizations at the wall.

 

If your goal is to create a highly intelligent character that can manipulate others while still being interesting to read, I'd suggest studying some similar characters in other literature and see if one of those methods works for you, or at least inspires you. One thing I think is important is to make clear the character doesn't know everything, but that they are always thinking about everything.

Some examples I can think of:

Tyrion Lannister from a song of Ice and Fire by George Martin. It's been a while since I've read this, so I'm not entirely sure how his viewpoint is written in the novel.

Sand dan Glokta from the First Law books by Joe Abercrombie. He is a character that always studies the world around and his thoughts about his observations are written in italic. This gives him a distinct feel of being someone who thinks more than everyone else in the novels.

 

ASoIaF, I’d also be thinking of Varys and Littlefinger, two guy always with their noses in everything, and always playing games.

 

I think you should perhaps read a couple of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op short stories, specifically "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money". And read them in that order. They're an almost textbook example of how to show an intelligent character who manipulates people and situations based on observations and deductions, not all of which are shown or fully explained. If you want to see Dashiell Hammett pull the same trick at novel length, try reading "Red Harvest".

 

Real espionage is probably like real computer hacking: far less esoteric than it is often portrayed. A lot of hacking is not so much about knowing 14 computer languages and being able to use two keyboards at once, as it is about calling a place, posing as John Smith who works there, and asking to reset his password.

What I'm saying is, you can start simple. Preternatural abilities don't need to be introduced where mundane deceptions that even you could do would work. A lot of spying is probably about having the audacity to do stuff like rifling through someone's private belongings or telling simple lies over the phone.

One of the ways that magicians deceive audiences is by putting more effort into an illusion than people would believe. The audience will have the pre-conscious thought that, "Yeah, there might be a way to do that trick if I put in 5000 hours of effort, but nobody would work that hard and sacrifice that much time on something so simple, so there must be an easier way." Nobody seriously considers that possibility, when that's how it really was done. Deception doesn't have to accomplish the impossible, it just has to accomplish the unbelievable.

 

So, the thing about highly intelligent characters is that the intelligence isn't magic.

Well, no. It's actually pretty useful to think of intelligence as a magic system provided that you think through the limitations to intelligence like you would a system of magic. In short, just like it wouldn't be satisfying to a reader to have Gandalf just poof the Fellowship straight to Mount Doom it would be unsatisfying to have a highly intelligent person produce a solution that hasn't been earned.

Sanderson's Laws of Magic can be useful here.

1st law: An Author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.

When applied to highly intelligent this means how well the reader understands the characters thought process AND the resources it provides them.

Understanding the thought process is easiest when the highly intelligent character is the viewpoint character. Think of Sherlock in the 2009 movie. We get his internal monologue going over the moves he'll use in a fight, or when he uses a sherlock scan to identify someone's backstory from small clues across their bodies.

When they're not the viewpoint character you need to be careful to avoid having that internal monologue become an external monologue to whatever poor Watson you've brought along, but it's vital that they don't come across as just pulling answers out of thin air.

The resources provided would be, to keep using Sherlock as an example, establishing that he's fond and skilled at disguises early to justify using it later. Do they always have a knife hidden on them somewhere? Do they have their own network of informants even if it's something as informal as a gossipy bar matron?

Frankly it's important for that the resources used to solve a conflict are understood for any kind of character but the resources available to a physically focused character (aka muscles and a sharpened piece of metal) or a mystically focused character (all the fireballs) are easier to understand than somebody that gets along on their wits.

2nd Law: Limitations are more important than powers.

If a character's plans always go off without a hitch then it should only be because they've got so many plans running at once that one of them is bound to succeed and they're enough of a bullshiter to ensure that you only see the ones that succeed while the rest get swept under the rug.

They should be blindsided from time to time. They should have to hit the books to try to figure out what the monster hiding in the woods is. They should be wrong.

They key point of psychological conflict is that it's conflict. The characters need to be challenged and they have to overcome it.

If I was writing a story featuring Lex Luthor as a protagonist I'd find it a lot more interesting to have him lose all his money and be forced to use his wits to build it back up from nothing.

More specifically, limitations can be things like a university trained mage not having the first clue about what sort of blacksmith techniques are needed to reforge the legendary magic sword, or having some witness with vital information you need killed by the baddies before you can get to them.

3rd Law: Expand what you already have before you add something new.

This just goes along with the first two. Don't whip out a new skill out of nowhere to solve a problem. It's more useful as a limitation. Try to build up on what you have had happened before where you can. Need to get into the castle? Maybe the gossipy bar matron that appeared earlier knows a girl whose sister works in the castle and can sneak you in. Did a previous book's villain have a magic neutralizing sword that nearly wiped the party? Well, why not take the shards of his sword and make a set of daggers from them.

 

I think the important thing to remember about psychological combat is that anything can happen inside the mind and because it's happening inside the mind everything has to be momentous, felt, and experienced. It's the same as tactile combat, except that there is a psychic perturbance in the way you execute showing, and not telling, someone that a psychological battle is ensuing.