Real-world public figures reveal exactly how Character Types drive story

There’s a reason political dramas dominate prestige television. From The West Wing to Succession to House of Cards, audiences are endlessly fascinated by the machinery of power — who holds it, who loses it, and what it costs.

But what makes a political character truly unforgettable on screen isn’t the policy debate or the backroom deal. It’s the internal engine driving every decision they make. That internal engine is Character Type.

Real-world presidents, politicians, and public figures are among the best teaching tools a screenwriter has. Why? Because we know their histories. We’ve watched them succeed and fail in public. We’ve seen their blind spots play out on a global stage. We don’t have to guess — we know their story.

Here’s what studying them can teach you about writing characters that feel genuinely alive.

The World View Is Everything

Every Character Type operates from a distinct philosophy of life — a lens through which all experience is filtered. This isn’t a trait or a personality quirk. It’s the bedrock assumption a person carries about how the world works and what they must do to survive and thrive in it.

Consider Abraham Lincoln. His entire political life was shaped by a belief in moral truth as the ultimate arbiter of action. He moved slowly, agonizingly, toward decisions — not because he was weak or indecisive, but because the weight of what was right had to be felt fully before he could act on it. When he finally did act, he acted with the unshakeable conviction of someone who had done the moral calculus and arrived at bedrock.

That’s a writer’s gift: a character whose deliberation is the drama.

Contrast this with Lyndon Johnson. LBJ’s world view was built around power and leverage — the belief that power is the mechanism through which anything of lasting value gets accomplished, and that reluctance to use power is a kind of moral failure. His mastery of the Senate, his relentless arm-twisting, his almost physical need to dominate a room — these weren’t personality excesses. They were expressions of a coherent philosophy about what it takes to actually change things rather than merely stand for them.

Two men who both wanted justice. Radically different ideas about how justice is achieved. That tension — at the level of world view — is the raw material of compelling drama.

Fear Drives the Dark Side

One of the most powerful tools in the Nine Character Types® framework is the relationship between a character’s core fear and their Dark Side behavior. When the fear is activated, the strengths that define them can curdle into something destructive — and still be entirely recognizable as them.

Richard Nixon is a case study in this dynamic. Brilliant, strategic, capable of genuinely consequential statecraft — and yet undone by a fear of being outmaneuvered, humiliated, exposed as less than. The very intelligence that made him effective became the instrument of his self-destruction. He didn’t need to bug the Watergate. He was already winning. But the fear didn’t care about the odds. It spoke louder than the evidence.

For screenwriters, this is the lesson: your character’s Dark Side isn’t a different person. It’s the same person, operating from fear rather than strength. The behavior looks different, but the internal logic is continuous. Nixon paranoid is still Nixon. That coherence is what makes a villain — or a tragic hero — feel true.

The Life Lesson Shapes the Arc

Character arc isn’t just change. It’s specific change — the kind that can only happen when a character confronts and works through the particular lesson their Character Type demands of them.

Consider Barack Obama through this lens. His public story is shaped by an extraordinary capacity for reason, synthesis, and long-horizon thinking. He consistently sought to hold competing perspectives simultaneously, to find the analytical framework that could contain apparent contradictions. At his best, this produced legislation, diplomacy, and rhetoric of genuine complexity and craft.

But the Life Lesson that shadows that strength is the peril of analysis as avoidance — the risk that the search for the perfect framework becomes a way of deferring the costs of direct confrontation. Critics from across the political spectrum, for very different reasons, often landed on a version of this critique: that the elegant formulation sometimes substituted for the harder act.

Whether you agree with that assessment politically isn’t the point. The point is that this tension — between the genuine strength and the growth edge — is exactly the kind of internal conflict that drives a character arc. Not an external obstacle. An internal one.

What This Means for Your Script

When you’re building a political character — a senator, a press secretary, a campaign manager, a president — the research question isn’t what did they do? It’s why did that feel necessary to them?

Study the public figures who share your character’s worldview. Read the biographies not for the events, but for the internal logic connecting the events. Look for the moments where strength tipped into self-sabotage, where fear spoke louder than wisdom, where the Life Lesson was almost learned — and wasn’t.

That’s where your script lives.

Political drama at its best isn’t about power. It’s about what people become in pursuit of it — and whether they can find their way back to who they actually are.

The world’s stage has given you an extraordinarily well-documented cast to learn from. Use them.

Pamela Harriman, the British-born socialite who became one of Washington’s most influential political powerbrokers and served as U.S. Ambassador to France under President Clinton, embodied the Power of Truth Character Type in ways that shaped American politics for decades. She wasn’t a politician herself—she was something far more powerful: the person politicians came to for access, funding, and strategic counsel. She was the advisor, the confidant, the keeper of secrets who understood that real power operates behind the scenes, through relationships built on trust and the strategic sharing of confidences.

The Secret Keeper and Strategic Connector

Harriman’s genius lay in her understanding that nothing in politics is what it seems on the surface. Born Pamela Digby in 1920, she married into Churchill’s family during World War II, then later wed Averell Harriman, the wealthy American diplomat and Democratic power player. But her real influence came from her ability to investigate beneath the surface of political life—to understand who really held power, what they really wanted, and how to connect the right people at the right moment. She operated from the classic Power of Truth worldview: everyone has hidden agendas, all political relationships are transactional, and the person who understands the hidden dynamics controls the game.

Her famous Georgetown salon became legendary precisely because it functioned as a Power of Truth operation. She didn’t just throw parties—she curated strategic gatherings where rising Democratic politicians, wealthy donors, foreign dignitaries, and power brokers could connect away from public scrutiny. She asked the questions others didn’t think to ask: “What do you really need? Who do you really need to know? What’s the obstacle no one’s talking about?” She investigated people’s true motivations, their hidden vulnerabilities, their secret ambitions—and then strategically connected them with others who could help or who needed help. She was building a network based on confidences, creating an “us vs. them” dynamic where being inside Pamela’s circle meant access to power that outsiders could only dream of.

The Power of Truth Strategic Approach

Harriman exemplified the Power of Truth Character Type’s strategic embrace—moving toward people to build relationships that served larger goals. She didn’t command or demand; she cultivated. She made powerful men feel understood, wealthy donors feel essential, young politicians feel valued. She shared secrets to demonstrate trustworthiness, created intimacy through confidential conversations, and built loyalty by making people feel they were part of an inner circle that understood how things really worked. As the Nine Character Types® framework explains, Power of Truth characters “gain alliances through shared confidences and demonstrations of their own trustworthiness, loyalty and commitment.” Harriman mastered this completely.

Yet she also embodied the Power of Truth character’s contradictions. She needed to embrace others—building the relationships that gave her influence—while maintaining enough distance to see clearly, to calculate, to avoid being used herself. She investigated everyone (what’s their real agenda?) while presenting herself as the ultimate insider who could be trusted with anything. She built her power on being the advisor rather than the leader, more comfortable behind the scenes than in the spotlight, which is classic Power of Truth leadership style. Politicians came to her for counsel, donors came to her to understand where to place their bets, and everyone came to her because she knew what was really happening beneath Washington’s public performances.

Ambassador to France: The Perfect Role

When Clinton appointed Harriman as Ambassador to France in 1993, it was the perfect culmination of her Power of Truth journey. Diplomacy itself is a Power of Truth profession—nothing is what it seems, everyone has hidden agendas, relationships are built on strategic trust while maintaining skeptical distance. Harriman excelled at reading the room, understanding what the French really wanted versus what they said they wanted, building relationships with French officials while loyally serving American interests. She investigated beneath diplomatic niceties to find real leverage points. She used her legendary social skills to create informal channels where real negotiations could happen away from formal structures.

The Kingmaker’s Worldview

Harriman lived the Power of Truth worldview completely: life is a minefield where you must suspect everyone’s motives, trust carefully, and understand that all agendas are hidden. But unlike Power of Truth characters who fall into paranoid isolation, Harriman channeled this understanding productively. She didn’t withdraw from the political game—she mastered it by accepting its rules. She didn’t rage against the fact that politics operates through hidden deals and secret relationships—she became the person who facilitated those deals and built those relationships. She accepted that “maybe” was the best you could get in politics: maybe this candidate will win, maybe this policy will pass, maybe this relationship will prove valuable. She hung her entire influential life on those “maybes” and became one of the most powerful women in American politics without ever running for office herself.

Pamela Harriman died in 1997 while still serving as Ambassador, collapsing at the Ritz Paris pool—a fitting end for someone who spent her life at the intersection of power, diplomacy, and strategic relationships. She proved that the Power of Truth Character Type can thrive in the real world when you use your investigative instincts, your understanding of hidden dynamics, and your strategic relationship-building not for paranoid withdrawal but for creating genuine influence. She was the advisor every politician needed, the confidant everyone trusted, the keeper of secrets who never betrayed a confidence—and in being all those things, she became the kingmaker who shaped American politics from behind the scenes, exactly where Power of Truth characters are most comfortable and most powerful.

I AM BACK

I collapsed under the overwhelming weight of updating and keeping the website current, and took it all down. I was so gratified by how many of you wrote to me about missing this resource. I know it’s controversial, but AI saved me. It automated processes that I couldn’t handle on my own. Never fear. The content and analysis are all mine.  etbscreenwriting.com is back with fresh content every few days. I am currently updating The Power of Truth book, so I am concentrating on those character examples. But all the previous eBooks are back online.

The Power of Truth Character Type

What is a Character Type? Character Type determines how a person views the world, sees his or her place in it, and develops a philosophy of life and love, Character Type creates innate strengths and weaknesses and determines the lessons to be learn over the arc of the story. An archetype is a job (mentor, wizard, trickster, etc.) Character Type determines how someone does their job in story and why they do it.

Power of Truth characters go where others fear to tread in whatever job they do. They poke and prod, never believing what’s on the surface of things. They fear being unable to distinguish truth from lies or being unable to spot or prove cover-ups, conspiracies, hidden pitfalls, or the secret agendas of others. They suspect and try to detect what someone’s real motives might be or what is hidden from an initial or superficial assessment of a situation.

The past three years have seen an explosion of Power of Truth characters across television and film, reflecting our cultural moment of institutional distrust, conspiracy awareness, and reality fragmentation.

These aren’t just detectives solving crimes—they’re investigators questioning the nature of truth itself in a world where everyone seems to have hidden agendas, where news might be fake, where surveillance is ubiquitous, and where even your own memories might be unreliable.

Television has given us particularly compelling Power of Truth characters who investigate week after week as their paranoia deepens with each revelation.

Charlie Cale in Peacock’s Poker Face may be the most literal Power of Truth character ever created—Natasha Lyonne plays an itinerant casino worker with the supernatural ability to detect when anyone is lying to her. This makes her the perfect investigator and the loneliest person alive. Read more HERE.

Netflix’s The Diplomat brings the Character Type into international politics. Keri Russell’s Ambassador Kate Wyler investigates a massive conspiracy while trying to determine whom she can trust within her own government, including even her husband. Read more HERE.

HBO’s The Penguin shows the darkest version of the Character Type in Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb. Cobb is a Gotham crime boss who trusts absolutely no one and strategically builds relationships he’s already planning to betray—the Power of Truth character fallen completely to the Dark Side, where paranoia and disloyalty become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Read more HERE.

Recent films have explored the Power of Truth Character Type through both epic and intimate lenses.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two transforms the Character Type into mythic tragedy. Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides investigates his own destiny through prescient visions that reveal countless possible futures—which end in betrayal and catastrophe. This creates the ultimate Power of Truth nightmare: having access to the truth about what’s coming and still being unable to prevent the worst of it. Read more HERE.

The horror film Longlegs features Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker investigating a serial killer, only to discover disturbing connections to her own past and the possibility that her investigative abilities might have a supernatural source. Read more HERE.

These characters proliferate because we’re living through an era that validates Power of Truth paranoia. Institutional betrayals have proven real (government surveillance, criminal cover-ups, political conspiracies), reality itself seems fragmented (deepfakes, misinformation, social media manipulation), and the question “What’s really happening?” has become a matter of survival rather than neurosis.

It’s good to be back.  I’ve missed you!

Get The Power of Truth eBook. HERE

The Trial That Never Ends:
What Two Nuremberg Films Reveal About the Nine Character Types®

Both films are set in the shadow of the same courtroom. Both are serious, prestigious works about Nazi war crimes and the reckoning that followed.

Yet Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and the 2025 Nuremberg — James Vanderbilt’s psychological thriller with Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, now streaming on Netflix — feel so radically different that viewers sometimes wonder if they belong to entirely different genres.

They do. The difference is the Character Type at the dramatic engine of each film. Once you see it, you understand everything — including why the 2025 film ends not with a verdict, but with a suicide.

The Dramatic Engine Is Everything

In the Nine Character Types® framework, the Character Type powering the protagonist determines the story’s central question, the nature of conflict, and what kind of truth the audience walks away carrying.

Power of Truth characters are driven by a need to perceive what is genuinely real, no matter the cost. Their stories ask: what is true when truth requires something unbearable of us?

Power of Reason characters are driven by a need to understand — to find the system, the logic, the explanation. They believe the world makes sense if you analyze it correctly. Their stories ask: can this (evil) be understood? And what happens to the person who tries to make the world understand?

Same courtroom. Completely different dramatic souls.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961): The Power of Truth Story

Stanley Kramer’s film is, at its core, a Power of Truth drama — and Spencer Tracy’s Judge Dan Haywood is its engine.

Haywood arrives in Germany as a genuine outsider: a modest judge from Maine with no political agenda and no personal stake in the verdict. His worldview is simple and devastating. He will look at what actually happened. Not at what is convenient to believe, not at what the State Department needs for Cold War optics, not at what the charming German social world wants him to see. He needs to understand what is genuinely true about what occurred in this courtroom — and why.

This is the hallmark of a Power of Truth Character Type in action. They cannot be bought or managed, not because they are morally superior, but because they are constitutionally incapable of accepting a false picture of reality.

Against him stands Hans Rolfe — Maximilian Schell in his Oscar-winning performance — a Power of Reason Character Type and the perfect intellectual foil. Rolfe’s defense is technically brilliant. He doesn’t deny the crimes. He constructs a logical argument that distributed culpability so widely — to the Allies who signed treaties with Hitler, to American eugenicists who inspired Nazi law — that individual guilt becomes philosophically untenable. Every argument is technically airtight. Every argument is profoundly, spiritually empty.

Haywood’s arc isn’t about defeating Rolfe’s logic. It’s about recognizing the limit of logic as a path to truth. He doesn’t out-argue Rolfe. He simply refuses to accept that a technically valid argument constitutes reality.

Then there is Ernst Janning — Burt Lancaster — the film’s hidden heart. Janning is a Power of Conscience Character Type: a man of genuine moral conviction who compromised himself incrementally, who collaborated through silence and passivity rather than enthusiasm and belief. His shattering courtroom confession is the Power of Conscience’s defining journey — the long, costly return to alignment with values he never actually abandoned, only betrayed.

The lesson for writers: A Power of Truth protagonist doesn’t drive action through plot mechanics. They drive it through presence and clear seeing. Haywood’s willingness to look directly at what happened forces every other character to either tell the truth or reveal themselves in the act of hiding it.

Nuremberg (2025): The Power of Reason Story

Here is where the 2025 film makes its radical departure — and where the Nine Character Types® framework reveals exactly why this film had to end the way it does.

Rami Malek’s Douglas Kelley is a Power of Reason Character Type, and the film is his story. Kelley arrives at Nuremberg as a U.S. Army psychiatrist with a clear, logical mission: evaluate the mental status of the Nazi defendants, determine whether they are fit for trial, and in doing so, crack the code of evil. His worldview is the worldview of Reason at its most confident — if we can understand something, we can prevent it from happening again. Evil, to Kelley, is a problem to be diagnosed.

What he finds is the thing that destroys him.

Göring is not insane. He is not a monster in any clinical sense. He is intelligent, charming, strategically brilliant, and fully sane by every metric. He chose this. Ordinary sanity enabled extraordinary atrocity. The Power of Reason’s promise — that understanding leads to prevention — cannot survive this discovery.

And Russell Crowe’s Göring, a masterclass in Power of Will, is the perfect antagonist for a Power of Reason protagonist. The Power of Will without moral compass is among the most terrifying Character Types to place on screen. Göring treats the entire trial as a chess match he intends to win even from a prison cell. He coaches the other defendants. He manages his own image for posterity. He grants Kelley access not out of cooperation but out of control — every conversation is Göring’s opportunity to dominate the frame. He ultimately takes his own life rather than allow the Allies the satisfaction of the hangman.

Notice the structural perfection of this opposition. Kelley’s Power of Reason strength is analysis and systematic understanding. Göring’s Power of Will strength is dominating the present, bending every situation to his advantage. Kelley wants to understand Göring. Göring wants to use Kelley. And Göring, in the film’s devastating logic, wins.

The film’s intertitles deliver the verdict: Kelley returns to the United States, publishes his book, (which fails) descends into alcoholism, and in 1958 — thirteen years after Nuremberg — takes his own life by swallowing cyanide. The same method Göring used. The film doesn’t explain this. It doesn’t need to. The Power of Reason protagonist stared into the mechanism of evil long enough to absorb it.

This is the dark arc that the Nine Character Types® framework predicts for Power of Reason characters when they go wrong. Logic divorced from moral grounding doesn’t protect you. It creates a kind of intellectual fascination that can override self-preservation entirely. Kelley wanted an answer. He got one. The answer was unbearable. No one cared.

The lesson for writers: A Power of Reason protagonist in a dark arc doesn’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because they’re right — and the truth they discover is one that reason alone cannot metabolize. The horror isn’t madness. It’s clarity.

What the Comparison Teaches

Placed side by side, these two films illuminate something essential about Character Type as dramatic engine.

Judgment at Nuremberg is intimate — small rooms, close faces, the texture of individual human conscience. Because its Power of Truth protagonist drives toward authentic reckoning with what actually happened, the film is about what it costs individual human beings to know what they know. Its emotional register is quiet, relentless, and finally devastating.

Nuremberg (2025) is psychological — mostly a tight two-handers, interrogation rooms, the dangerous territory between analyst and subject. Because its Power of Reason protagonist drives toward understanding through analysis, the film is about the terrible limits of that project. Its emotional register is unsettling, intellectual, and finally tragic.

Both films take the same event and ask it a completely different question. Judgment at Nuremberg asks: what is really happened and what is true? Nuremberg (2025) asks: can this evil be understood and prevented? The first film ends with a verdict that means something. The second ends with a brilliant man who knew exactly what he found — and couldn’t live with knowing it (when the rest of the world didn’t seem to care).

The Character Type at the center of a story isn’t just a character choice. It is the story’s entire emotional universe. Change the Character Type, and you change the question, the conflict, the arc, the ending, and the understanding the audience carries home.

That is the power of the Nine Character Types®.

Get the Power of Truth eBook  HERE

Get the Power of Reason eBook HERE

Get the Power of Will eBook HERE

Anton Ego doesn’t know he’s about to be humbled.

He arrives at Gusteau’s restaurant that night as the most feared critic in Paris — thin, cold, and certain of his own taste and discernment. He has spent a career deciding who belongs and who doesn’t. Who has merit and who is merely pretending. And, now,  he has been wrong in the most spectacular way imaginable.

A rat has out-cooked everyone in the kitchen.

By the end of Ratatouille, Ego doesn’t just revise his review. He revises himself. He writes the most honest words of his career: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

That line isn’t just a satisfying ending to an animated film. It’s a precise diagnosis of the single greatest mistake organizations make when they build teams, hire talent, and decide who gets a seat at the table.

The Gusteau Problem

Auguste Gusteau’s famous motto — “Anyone can cook” — was mocked by the establishment as naïve populism. Food critics like Ego saw it as a lowering of standards, a sentimental lie told to flatter the unqualified.

But Gusteau wasn’t saying everyone produces excellent work. He was saying that excellence doesn’t live where you expect it to.

This is the core insight that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion rests on — and it’s not a political idea. It’s a competitive one.

When organizations draw their talent from a narrow pool defined by familiarity, tradition, and the comfortable assumption that greatness looks a certain way, they are making the same mistake Anton Ego made. They are confusing access with ability. They are selecting for people who resemble the last successful person, rather than selecting for the quality that actually drives success.

What “Anywhere” Actually Means

The word that matters in Ego’s quote isn’t “great.” It’s anywhere.

Anywhere means different backgrounds. Different life experiences. Different ways of seeing the same problem. Different assumptions about what’s possible and what’s been done before.

This is not charity. This is strategy.

Research on team performance consistently shows that groups with diverse perspectives — people who don’t all share the same blind spots — outperform homogeneous groups on complex, creative, and adaptive problems. The reason is structural: when everyone in the room was trained in the same tradition, educated in the same institutions, and shaped by the same cultural assumptions, they generate the same solutions. They are excellent at refining what already exists. They are poorly equipped to imagine what doesn’t yet exist.

Remy wasn’t admitted to Gusteau’s kitchen. He had to hide. He had to work through a human intermediary just to have his talent registered at all. And the restaurant — and ultimately Ego himself — was transformed by what that excluded perspective made possible.

The Current Backlash Is a Familiar Story

We are living through a moment of organized retreat from DEI commitments. Companies are quietly dismantling programs. The acronym itself has become politically charged. The argument being made, in various forms, is that DEI represents the triumph of identity over merit — that it rewards people for being the right kind of person rather than the best person for the role.

This argument would be more persuasive if organizations had actually been selecting purely on merit before DEI existed.

They weren’t. They were selecting on familiarity, on network access, on the kind of “culture fit” that is often just a polite name for resemblance. They were selecting people who went to the right schools, knew the right people, and moved through the world in ways that felt legitimate to whoever was doing the hiring.

Ego’s restaurant world had the same problem. The critics, the institutions, the gatekeepers — they weren’t protecting quality. They were protecting a definition of quality that happened to exclude the people they didn’t expect to see.

Greatness Is Not a Comfortable Process

Here’s what Ratatouille doesn’t flinch from: Remy’s presence in that kitchen is deeply disruptive. Linguini can barely hold himself together. The staff is confused. The system wasn’t built for what’s happening. It requires Colette, the most disciplined and skilled human chef in the kitchen, to extend trust she has never been asked to extend before.

Real inclusion is like this. It is not a smooth process of adding new faces to an unchanged system. It requires the system itself to become more flexible, more honest about what it values and why, and more willing to be surprised.

That is uncomfortable. It is also, when organizations have the nerve to see it through, transformative.

The Lesson Ego Learns

What makes Anton Ego one of the most interesting characters in Pixar’s catalog is that he doesn’t just tolerate his humbling — he receives it. He allows the experience to rewrite him. He closes his prestigious column and opens a small bistro where Remy’s food is served. He trades prestige for something better: genuine talent, taste, and discernment.

That’s the offer DEI actually makes to organizations willing to take it seriously. Not the performance of inclusion. Not the checkbox. But a genuine expansion of who gets to contribute — and what becomes possible when they do.

Not every company will have the courage to take that offer right now.

But the great ones can come from anywhere.

Excerpted from “Writers and Their Dogs,” Eating My Words (eatingmywords.com.au)

The writing life is, by its very nature, a solitary one. It demands long hours cooped up alone, locked in a fraught negotiation with the page — one shadowed by self-doubt and cut off from easy human connection. Which is exactly why so many writers have found their most essential companion not in other people, but in a dog.

As author Helen Humphreys has observed, the intimacy a dog offers may be uniquely suited to a writer — because while closeness with other people so often draws a writer away from their work, closeness with a dog tends to bring them back toward it. Eating My Words

The history of literature bears this out. Virginia Woolf had her mongrel terrier Grizzle, adopted from the Battersea Dogs’ Home, who appears in her diaries as a kind of creative touchstone. “And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul,” Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes: but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle … and the soul slips in.” Eating My Words

Gertrude Stein — who left behind some of the most memorable writing about dogs in the literary canon — understood this reciprocal dependency well. The dog needs the writer. The writer needs the dog. And something about being needed by another creature unlocks the imagination in ways that solitude alone cannot. Eating My Words

There is also the matter of perspective. Living alongside a dog — introducing them to the world, seeing familiar things through their alert, unguarded eyes — has a way of making the world feel new again. And that renewal is something every writer, however experienced, desperately needs. Eating My Words

NOTE FROM LAURIE– At ETB Screenwriting, we talk a lot about the foundation of great storytelling: knowing your characters from the inside out. But that kind of deep observation doesn’t begin at the keyboard. It begins in the world — in the habit of paying close attention to other living beings, noticing how they move through space, what they want, what they fear, how they love. A dog, it turns out, is one of the best teachers of that skill you’ll ever have. They live their inner life openly, moment to moment, without artifice or agenda. Watching them is, in the truest sense, character study.

So if you’re stuck — on a scene, on a character, on the page itself — maybe the answer isn’t more time at your desk. Maybe it’s a leash and a walk around the block.

Read the full article at eatingmywords.com.au

What Anne Rice’s Most Dangerous Vampire

Can Teach Screenwriters About Character

There is no shortage of vampires in fiction. But there is only one Lestat.

He isn’t the brooding undead, tormented by his own monstrousness. He isn’t the calculating predator who moves through human society like a shadow. Lestat de Lioncourt is something far more specific, and far more instructive for writers who want to understand what really drives a character at the deepest level.

Lestat is a Power of Idealism character.

Not image. Not ambition. Not ego, though he has plenty of that. The Power of Idealism is defined by an uncompromising inner standard, a vision of what life should look and feel and mean. And an absolute refusal to accept anything less. Power of Idealism characters don’t perform their values. They live them, at full intensity, regardless of cost.

That distinction matters. Power of Ambition characters want to be seen as magnificent. Power of Idealism characters want to be magnificent, whether anyone is watching or not.

Lestat, alone in a decaying French manor with a blind and dying father, still dresses impeccably. Still demands beauty from his surroundings. Still insists that existence be worthy of him. Not because he’s performing for an audience. Because anything less would be a betrayal of his own internal code.

The AMC series understands this completely. Sam Reid’s Lestat doesn’t just inhabit a room, he curates it. Every gesture, every provocation, every declaration of love is drenched in that same relentless standard. This is a man, a monster, for whom mediocrity is the only true sin.

The Power of Idealism sees the world as it should be . And is perpetually, almost violently, aware of the gap between that vision and reality. For Lestat, human life (and immortal life) is raw material. It can be shaped into something extraordinary, or it can be wasted in mediocrity and fear. He has no patience for the latter.

This is why Louis , cautious, grief-stricken, endlessly questioning, drives Lestat to fury in both the novels and the AMC series. Louis keeps asking whether to live. Lestat has never once entertained the question. The answer is always yes. Always fully. Always now.

The AMC series deepens this tension beautifully. By setting the story in early twentieth-century New Orleans and making Louis a Black Creole man navigating a brutally stratified society, the show gives Louis’s hesitation real historical weight. It also sharpens Lestat’s incomprehension. To him, Louis has everything, beauty, intelligence, capacity for intensity, and still chooses suffering over transformation. For a Power of Idealism character, that is not just baffling. It is an affront.

Every Character Type carries a central story question — the deepest tension that drives them through a narrative.

For the Power of Idealism, that question is: Can I find — or create — a world worthy of my vision?

Lestat spends the entire Vampire Chronicles in pursuit of that answer. He makes vampires out of people he believes have the capacity for the life he envisions. He builds households, relationships, dynasties, not out of loneliness, but out of the Power of Idealism’s compulsive need to curate existence. To populate his world with people who can meet his standard.

When they can’t, or won’t, he is not just disappointed. He is affronted. Because to a Power of Idealism character, falling short of your potential isn’t a personal failure. It’s a moral one.

The AMC series makes this explicit in the dynamic between Lestat and Louis. Lestat’s cruelty isn’t random. It’s the cruelty of someone who believes absolutely in what Louis could become, and cannot forgive him for refusing to get there.

Lestat’s gift, and it is genuinely a gift, is that he makes others want more from their own lives. Louis, for all his resentment, is transformed by his centuries with Lestat. Claudia burns with an intensity she might never have found without him. Even the reader, even the viewer, watching Lestat move through the world with such unrepentant appetite, feels the pull of it.

This is the Power of Idealism at its best: the ability to raise the temperature of every room, every relationship, every moment. To make people believe that a more vivid, more fully inhabited life is actually possible.

Reid’s performance in the AMC series captures this quality in a way that’s rare onscreen. There are moments — Lestat at the piano, Lestat mid-argument, Lestat simply entering — where the character’s conviction is so total that you understand, viscerally, why Louis stayed as long as he did.

But the Power of Idealism has a Dark Side, and Anne Rice knew exactly where to find it.

A Power of Idealism character cannot accept limitation, not in themselves, and not in those they love. The vision of what should be is so absolute that it can become a kind of tyranny. Lestat doesn’t just want Louis to embrace immortality. He needs Louis to love it, the way Lestat loves it. When Louis refuses, Lestat experiences it as a fundamental incomprehensibility, a failure he cannot forgive, because he cannot understand it.

The Dark Side of the Power of Idealism is the inability to distinguish between their vision and reality. Between what they believe should be true and what is true. This is how a Power of Idealism character, at their most destructive, stops inspiring people and starts imprisoning them.

The AMC series is unflinching about this. The abuse at the center of Lestat and Louis’s relationship isn’t incidental, it is the logical extreme of a character whose love comes with conditions written in their own blood. Lestat’s vision of what their life together should be is so complete, so total, that Louis’s reality simply cannot fit inside it.

Claudia, in both Rice’s novels and the series, is the clearest expression of this. Lestat makes her a vampire because he sees in her the capacity for the magnificent, the intense, the fully alive. He cannot see, will not see, what it costs her. His vision is simply too complete to accommodate her reality.

Every Character Type has a lesson they must learn, or fail to learn, over the course of the story. For the Power of Idealism, that lesson is accepting the humanity — and the limitations — of others without abandoning the vision.

Lestat begins the Chronicles largely unable to do this. His love is real, but it demands too much. By the later novels, something has shifted, a hard-won acknowledgment that his vision of perfection cannot be imposed, only offered.

The AMC series is still writing that arc in real time. What makes it compelling is that the show refuses to let Lestat off the hook while also refusing to reduce him to a villain. He is a Power of Idealism character in full, capable of breathtaking tenderness and genuine destruction, often in the same scene.

That is the arc. And it resonates far beyond vampire fiction.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR WRITING

Lestat endures, across Rice’s novels, the 1994 film, and now the AMC series, because his creators never confused his Character Type with his behavior. Lestat does outrageous things, selfish, manipulative, even monstrous things, but they always emerge from a coherent internal logic. He is never arbitrary. His worldview is legible on every page, in every scene.

That is the goal for any Power of Idealism character you write. The intensity, the refusal to compromise, the magnetic pull,  all of it must flow from that same unshakeable inner standard. Not from vanity. Not from ego. From an absolute conviction that life, lived fully, is worth everything it costs.

Lestat believes that with his whole being. And somehow, impossibly, he makes us believe it too.

In these very troubled times, we could all use a little hope and joy. The Persian New Year begins in Spring a time of rebirth and renewal.

Every year, as the last chill of winter loosens its grip, millions of people across Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and diaspora communities worldwide pause to celebrate Nowruz — the Persian New Year marking the spring equinox. Rooted in Zoroastrian tradition and stretching back over three thousand years, Nowruz is far more than a calendar event. It is a living story, retold through ritual, gathering, and the quiet symbolism of a carefully arranged table. Before a single gift is exchanged or a single dish is served, Nowruz asks its celebrants to become storytellers.

At the heart of the holiday sits the haft-sin table — seven items beginning with the Persian letter “sin,” each one a chapter in a larger narrative about renewal and hope. The sprouts of sabzeh (wheat or lentil greens) speak of new beginnings; sib(apple) carries the ancient promise of health and beauty; somaq (sumac) foretells the sunrise after darkness. To set a haft-sin is to arrange a story about what it means to be human in a turning world. Elders pass down the significance of each item to children, grandchildren, and anyone willing to listen — so that the tradition itself becomes the vessel for cultural memory, crossing borders and generations without losing its meaning.

Nowruz has also inspired a rich body of storytelling in Persian literature. The great epic Shahnameh by the poet Ferdowsi — composed around 1000 CE — places the origin of Nowruz at the feet of the mythical king Jamshid, who is said to have ushered in a golden age of light and prosperity on the first day of spring. This story has been recited, illustrated, and performed for centuries, binding the holiday to the very idea of narrative itself. To celebrate Nowruz is, in some sense, to step inside a poem — to inhabit a story that insists the world can always begin again.

What makes Nowruz so enduring is exactly what makes all great storytelling endure: it holds something true. The spring equinox will come whether or not we mark it, but Nowruz transforms that astronomical fact into something felt — a shared exhale, a fire jumped over, a table set with seeds and mirrors, and the smell of something sweet cooking. In a fragmented modern world, the holiday reminds us that stories are not merely decoration. They are the architecture of belonging, the way communities hold themselves together across time. Nowruz is proof that the oldest stories, told faithfully enough, never really end. They endure.

Catherine Ravenscroft – Disclaimer

Cate Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft in Apple TV+’s Disclaimer offers a masterful study of what happens when the Power of Truth investigator becomes the investigated. Catherine is a celebrated documentary filmmaker who has built her career exposing the secrets and lies of powerful people. She’s the person who asks “What really happened?” and uncovers uncomfortable truths others want buried. But when a mysterious novel arrives, revealing her own devastating secret from decades past, Catherine must turn her investigative skills on herself as she tries to determine who’s exposing her and why.

The series creates exquisite Power of Truth tension through its structure: Catherine knows everyone has secrets (that’s her profession), but she believed her own secret was safely buried in the past. Now someone is weaponizing that secret against her, threatening to destroy her marriage, her relationship with her son, and her professional reputation. She must ask the classic questions—”Who’s exposing me? What do they know? How much will be revealed? Who can I trust?”—while confronting the horrifying possibility that the version of truth she’s been living with isn’t the only version, or even the correct one.

What makes Catherine particularly compelling as a Power of Truth character is the irony: the professional seeker of truth must confront uncomfortable truths about herself. She’s spent her career investigating others while maintaining careful control over her own narrative. Now that control is stripped away, and she experiences what her documentary subjects must have felt—the vulnerability of exposure, the fear that the truth will be misunderstood or weaponized, the desperate need to control the narrative before it destroys you. The show explores whether Catherine’s version of what happened years ago is the truth, a lie, or something more complicated—a self-protective story she’s told herself for so long that she’s lost track of what’s real. Her journey asks: Can a Power of Truth character investigate themselves honestly? Or does the need for self-protection inevitably distort the truth they claim to seek?

When a character is disappointed, rejected, or has a set-back, he or she is in distress which leads to a loss grief cycle.

 INTRODUCTION

What Feels Real

Human beings perceive reality in sets of three. When something looks or feels “real,” we say it has three dimensions. For example: Every painting is composed of a background, middle ground and foreground. The picture is viewed as a whole and is instantly judged as to how all three visual elements work together. Likewise, every piece of music is composed of harmony, melody, and rhythm. Each song is heard as a whole and is instantly judged as to how all three compositional elements work together. All three layers need to be present to create the richest viewing or listening experience.

Emotional Depth of Field

A fictional character’s personality or “emotional depth of field” is composed of a psychological set of three. These are: the character’s Immediate Tactics, Long-term Orientation, and Strategic Approach. The audience views the character as a whole and instantly judges how all three elements work together. Each layer needs to be present to create a rich, complex, three-dimensional character that “feels real.” Here’s a closer look at the three elements:

 Immediate Tactics

A character’s Immediate Tactics are how a character viscerally reacts to an unexpected challenge, opportunity, or threat. This is a character’s short-term or immediate response or action when caught unawares in a surprising situation or when encountering an unforeseen obstacle or problem. Immediate Tactics are the character’s first emotional response. These tactics are a character’s automatic responses when startled or caught off guard.

Long-term Orientation

A character’s Long-Term Orientation is the character’s ordinary actions based on his or her belief system and personal values. This orientation defines what a character does based on how he or she views the world, believes the world works, values most, and defines life, love, and his or her role or place in the world. It is how the character behaves overall, based on their accumulated beliefs, assumptions, and ideas.

Strategic Approach

A character’s Strategic Approach is how a character meets an opportunity, challenge, or threat overall. This is how a character takes charge or commands others to achieve a long-term goal. Strategy is the art of obtaining a larger, grander, or overarching objective. It is how the character tackles obstacles and works toward getting what he or she most fervently desires.

As of this writing, it’s been a chilly, rainy autumn in the UK. Netflix here posted the whole Harry Potter movie series. I missed a few of the titles when the films were first released. A very wet week was perfect for reviewing the whole collection.

The film series reminded me of a conversation with a friend about archetypes. #AIstorytelling seems to lean heavily on this concept. But an archetype is a job description: a wizard, a trickster, a mother, a hero, an outlaw, a seductress, a fool, a mentor, a judge, or a king.

Let’s take the first job on the list, wizard. The Harry Potter book and film series features many different wizards. Each has its own kind of wizardry and distinctive personality.

That’s the problem with archetypes. There is no one way to be a wizard. There are many ways to play that role in a story. Different wizards view their role or job differently, believe different things about the world, and frame their responsibilities very differently. In a story, a character’s job or role is much less important than how the person sees the world, understands that role, and fulfills their duties.

That’s where Character Type comes in. Character Type determines how a person views the world, sees his or her place in it, and develops a philosophy of life and love. Character Type creates innate strengths and weaknesses and determines the lessons to be learnt over the arc of the story. Different Character Types are concerned with very different aspects of their roles or jobs. For example:

A Power of Will wizard is most concerned with using his or her abilities to increase his or her power or to expand and defend a personal domain, to bend others or the elements into submission. Lord Voldemort is a great example. “There is no good and evil, there is only power…and those too weak to seek it.”

A Power of Conscience wizard is most concerned with the justice and ethics of magic and how it is properly or most rightly used. They do not break rules or tolerate misbehavior. Minerva McGonagall is a great example: ‘Now, I must warn you that the most stringent anti-cheating charms have been applied to your examination papers. Auto-Answer Quills are banned from the examination hall, as are Remembralls, Detachable Cribbing Cuffs, and Self-Correcting Ink. Every year, I am afraid to say, seems to harbour at least one student who thinks that he or she can get around the Wizarding Examinations Authority’s rules. I can only hope that it is nobody in Gryffindor.”

A Power of Ambition wizard is most concerned with the flash, dazzle, and showy presentation required to be impressive, gain prestige, status, be popular, or acquire a grand reputation. Draco Malfoy is a great example: “My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford… You’ll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter. You don’t want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there.”

A Power of Truth wizard is most concerned with delving into deep, dark, hidden secrets. They are secret keepers, and it’s hard to know where their real loyalties lie. Severus Snape is a great example: “What made you think he’d really stopped supporting Voldemort, Professor?” Dumbledore held Harry’s gaze for a few seconds and then said, “That, Harry, is a matter between Professor Snape and myself.” Snape has the most surprising reveal in the story, a twist that changes our whole view of him at the end.

A Power of Reason wizard is most concerned with the magical formulas or precise processes that lead to specific knowledge or expertise. Hermione Granger is a great example: “That’s what Hermione does. When in doubt, go to the library.” She is a little off-putting and can be condescending, but she is one of the smartest and best-informed young wizards in the group.

A Power of Excitement wizard is most concerned with adventurous exploring, wild experimenting or creating the chaos that makes magic fun and surprising. They hate being bored or trapped. Sirius Black is a great example: “Personally, I’d have welcomed a dementor attack. A deadly struggle for my soul would have broken the monotony nicely. You think you’ve had it bad, at least you’ve been able to get out and about, stretch your legs, get into a few fights…. I’ve been stuck inside for a month.”

A Power of Love wizard is most concerned with relationship magic, bonding spells, and creating mutual alliances. These Character Types are stalwart friends and are self-sacrificing for others. Harry’s best friend Ron is a good example: “We’re nearly there,” Ron muttered suddenly. “Let me think — let me think…” The white queen turned her blank face toward him. “Yes…” said Ron softly, “it’s the only way … I’ve got to be taken.” “NO!” Harry and Hermione shouted. ” That’s chess!” snapped Ron. “You’ve got to make some sacrifices! I take one step forward and she’ll take me — that leaves you free to checkmate the king, Harry!”

A Power of Idealism wizard is most concerned with creating magic that is completely unique, entirely special, and reflects his or her deepest passions. These are the truly exceptional wizards, the legends. Dumbledore is a good example: “Professor Dumbledore, though very old, always gave an impression of great energy. He had several feet of long silver hair and beard, half-moon spectacles, and an extremely crooked nose. He was often described as the greatest wizard of the age.” Harry Potter is also such a legendary wizard, specially marked, and charged with a unique and extraordinary destiny.

A Power of Imagination wizard is eccentric, slightly dreamy, and lives in a world of their own. Although unassuming, these Character Types have enormous heart and bravery. These kinds of wizards can see and hear things others don’t or simply miss. Luna Lovegood is a great example: “Oh, yes,” said Luna, “I’ve been able to see them (winged horses) ever since my first day here. They’ve always pulled the carriages. Don’t worry. You’re just as sane as I am.”

Each type of wizard looks at the role of magic through a very different personal lens of Character Type. Resorting to an archetypal “wizard” too often results in cliched, stereotypical behavior. There is no one way to be a wizard, just as there is no one way to be a cop, a nurse, a priest, a mother, or a king. Each Character Type makes the role, the job, the archetype entirely his or her own. Each has a very specific personal journey.

Squid Game is a nine-episode Korean TV series on Netflix (with a sequel coming soon). Historically, the original is the most successful series ever to appear on the streaming platform.

The protagonist is Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a laid-off worker whose factory closed. He foolishly gambles to make the money he cannot earn. Gi-hun sinks deeply into debt, loses his wife to a more affluent suitor, and struggles to connect with his daughter. His mother has barely enough to eat, and he feels powerless to help her. Gambling is now his addiction.

Desperate poverty is at the heart of it all. Here in the US, millions of middle-class Americans are just one missed paycheck away from homelessness, with 4 of 10 without enough savings to cope with simple things gone wrong: a car repair, a broken refrigerator, a plumbing emergency.

Gambling is a monster that feeds on the poor and vulnerable. The largest numbers of gamblers come from the poorest sectors of the population. The vice leads to a betting addiction that destroys marriages, families, and lives.

In the series, Gi-hun is enticed into the Squid Game. The playing field is located in an isolated prison-like facility. The contestants play familiar Korean childhood games. The final prize is 45.6 billion won, or approximately $38 million. The winner becomes immensely wealthy; all the losers die. It’s a zero-sum game.

The desperation of poverty and powerlessness is made explicit in Squid Game.  Unlike Hunger Games, another single-survivor game, there is no fantasy world removed from reality. Viewers can’t pretend that Gi-hun’s despair is in an imaginary world.

Gi-hun’s violent creditors close in. They threaten to carve up his body for transplant parts. A chance encounter with a stranger offers hope. He is lured into a game of ddakji, an envelope-flipping betting contest. The next step is the Squid Game. Even when he knows what will happen in the game, it offers more hope and possibilities than the dire life he is currently leading.

The other contestants are just as poor and desperate.  The causes of modern income inequality might be complex, and the solutions multifaceted, but at the end of the day, some people have more than enough, and Gi-hun and his doomed co-players have nothing. “Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”

Squid Game is a nine-episode Korean TV series currently on Netflix. Historically, it is the most successful series on the streaming platform. 

The protagonist is Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a laid-off worker whose factory closed. He foolishly gambles to make the money he cannot earn. Gi-hun sinks deeply into debt, loses his wife to a more affluent suitor, and struggles to connect with his daughter. His mother has barely enough to eat, and he feels powerless to help her. Gambling is now his addiction.

Desperate poverty is at the heart of it all. Here in the US, millions of middle-class Americans are just one missed paycheck away from poverty, with 4 of 10 without enough savings to cope with simple things gone wrong: a car repair, a broken refrigerator, a plumbing emergency.

Gambling is a monster that feeds on the poor and vulnerable. The largest numbers of gamblers come from the poorest sectors of the population. The vice leads to addiction, which destroys marriages, families, and lives.

In the series, Gi-hun is enticed into the Squid Game. The playing field is located in an isolated prison-like facility. The contestants play familiar childhood games. The final prize is enormous wealth: 45.6 billion won, or approximately $38 million. The winner becomes immensely wealthy; all the losers die. It’s a zero-sum game.

The desperation of poverty and powerlessness is made explicit in Squid Game. Unlike Hunger Games, another single-survivor game, there is no fantasy world removed from reality. Viewers can’t pretend that Gi-hun’s despair is in an imaginary world. 

Gi-hun’s violent creditors are closing in. They threaten to carve up his body for transplant parts. A chance encounter with a stranger offers hope. He is lured into a game of ddakji, an envelope-flipping betting contest. The next step is the Squid Game. Even when he knows what will happen in the game, it offers more hope and possibilities than the hopeless life he is currently leading.

The other contestants are just as poor and desperate.  The causes of modern income inequality might be complex and the solutions multifaceted, but at the end of the day, there are some people who have more than enough, and Gi-hun and his doomed co-players have nothing. “Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”