Character Type: Advocate

“The Advocate taps into powerful psychological and emotional strains at work in our collective psyche. The hope there are good people out there. Fighters willing to take up our cause. Right can defeat might. Someone who gives voice to our beliefs and aspirations.”

Those of you who have followed my blog for some time or taken courses with me through Screenwriting Master Class know how fascinated I am with character archetypes, specifically how there are five — Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster — which recur in movies over and over and over.

Some might see archetypes as a sort of reductionist approach to writing when in my experience, it is precisely the opposite.

By working with these five Primary Character Archetypes, we can identify the core narrative function of every key character, then use that knowledge as a guide as we build them out in a limitless number of ways.

One approach is to use an extensive array of Character Types available to us to create unique, compelling figures in our stories.

Today: Advocate.

Some of the greatest movie roles have been Advocates. For example, memorable attorneys like Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) in Inherit the Wind (1960), Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) in The Verdict (1982), and perhaps the greatest Advocate them all — Atticus Finch played brilliantly by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).