Creating fully felt characters and weaving them into a satisfying plot can get a little complicated. The enneagram can help.
What is the enneagram?
A system of nine personality types representing distinct strategies for relating to the self, others, and the world. Compared to other systems, the enneagram is particularly useful because it explains personality rather than just classifies it. Enneagram describes what motivates people. This is everything when it comes to character and plot development in fiction.
In Fiction
To create good stories, our main characters need desires, strengths, fears, flaws, and a direction for growth. Having a system that clusters these necessities based on real humans helps tremendously in conjuring believable characters on a blank page.
In the first chapter, protagonists start with a desire. Oftentimes their external desire and internal desire are out of sync, irregardless these desires drive the character into the plot. The strengths of the character help the protagonist forward, while the fear and the subsequent flaws prevent them from realizing their goal. In the climax of the novel, the character will have faced their fear and overcome their flaw to transform or not. The enneagram can help us with all these core pieces.
Here is my cheat sheet on the nine core personality types compiled from www.enneagraminstitute.com and a smattering of other resources and conversations. I find it helpful to see it all in one place.
A Classic Example
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, an enneagram three, starts with a singular desire - to win Daisy Buchanan. He devoted himself to acquiring money, power, and prestige in order to capture her attention and admiration. He focuses on his material success and image, even recreating his past to fit his image, to feel valuable to Daisy. His drive and focus helped him accomplish amazing things. Unfortunately, he is also in love with the idea of Daisy, not Daisy herself, and true to the common pitfall of a type three personality, he does not realize or accept his true value. By failing to see his inherent worth, he does not transform at the end of the novel.
Relationships
Our protagonists don’t exist alone. The enneagram also describes how the different personality types react and relate to each other. Anyone on #teampeeta (type two) out there? Or will anyone admit to reading Fifty Shades and loving the Christian (type eight) and Ana (type two) dynamic?
Enneagram twos and eights are both action-oriented and love to provide for others, but twos tend to be people-oriented, empathetic, and indirect while eights are practical-minded, direct, and independent. Oh, the juicy conflict they’re in for. Luckily, they also embody some kernels to one another’s transformations. An eight can help a two prioritize their own needs while a two can help an eight feel love and express empathy.
Voice
Enneagram also helps with the most allusive aspect of craft--voice. Voice represents the authenticity, relatability, and candor in the story. Without a prolific model in your head, developing a consistent voice that matches the character can be tricky. Understanding the motivation behind the personality can provide the needed authenticity.
Figuring out a character’s enneagram type and then finding examples of that type is an excellent way to research voice. If you are writing a whimsical four, listen to the audiobook of Anne of Green Gables. Or if your four is a bit darker, explore Loki from the Marvel comics or read Wuthering Heights.
In Life
Even more than craft, the enneagram helps us understand ourselves. It is easy to assume that our strengths come easily to everyone or that people inherently value the same things. With the enneagram, we can more deeply appreciate what we offer the world and bring to our writing life. Do you have great capacity to research the depths of a topic like a type five might? Do you have an uncanny ability to know how your characters are feeling in every scene as a type four might? These are gifts to be celebrated.
Seeing our flaws is just as valuable. It can be hard to look directly at the darker parts of ourselves, but the enneagram proposes some potential wounds that underlie the flaws, spurning empathy rather than shame for them. We can see that everyone has wounds to heal. Does overthinking your plot lead you to write and anxiously rewrite the inciting incident countless times (type six)? Could several other hobbies be distracting you from focusing on the book you truly want to write (type seven)? Could your need to get absolutely everything correct hold you back from sharing your creativity with the world (type 1)?
Most importantly, the enneagram helps provide a direction to grow towards. The path of transformation is often counterintuitive, so it is helpful to have it spelled out clearly. As uncomfortable as it may be for a seven, focusing on one thing and facing challenging feelings might be what brings you joy. For a nine, maybe confronting the forces in your life will be what actually brings you peace. And for those tough eights out there, maybe revealing your soft and vulnerable self will create true strength. If you are your own protagonist, what do you need to transform?
In cultivating some examples of enneagram types for authors and characters, I was surprised to find some of the greatest protagonists in our culture were created by the authors with possibly the same enneagram type - Jay Gatsby, Harry Potter, Holden Caulfield, and many Austen heroines. By understanding ourselves, we may be giving life to a most profound protagonist on the page.
Caution
Limiting any person or character to a short list of attributes can be detrimental. While the simplicity of the enneagram is a strength of the system, just working from the cheat sheet and applying it with rigidity can result in flat characters or troupes. The enneagram has great nuance with each type having subtypes and wings, so if you find this primer useful, dive deeper to more fully understand yourself and your protagonist. Learn about childhood wounds, reactions under stress, and what true support from a mentor might look like. The application of this information is vast and nuanced, enjoy the journey. I look forward to reading all about the characters that come alive from it.
References
Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
The Enneagram Institute www.enneagraminstitute.com