Creating Engaging Characters with the Enneagram

"Deep reading . . . engaging with stories that explore the complexity of this character’s motivations or that character’s wounds, is a training ground for understanding human variety." David Brooks, The New York Times

In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Green Knight, Clement considers the qualities of Louise Anderson, whom he’s loved from afar:

“. . . she instinctively made all things better, speaking no evil, disarming hostility, turning ill away, making peace: her gentleness, which made her seem, sometimes, to some people, weak, insipid, dull. ‘She’s not exactly a strong drink!’ someone said.”

What a beautifully condensed metaphor: “She’s not exactly a strong drink.” Murdoch’s insight into human nature extends far beyond the usual guidelines for deepening character descriptions. In contrast, you’ve perhaps been asked to critique a beginning writer’s work, where characters seem flat and their voices similar, making it hard to distinguish among them.

"Of course we want to create people our readers will remember," writes Laurie Schnebly in Believable Characters. "Maybe not fondly, not if they're someone like Hannibal Lector . . . but our characters don't need to be loved, just remembered. How can we make that happen?"

Knowledge of key issues in each of nine personalities, suggests Judith Searle, in The Literary Enneagram, can help writers create “credible character arcs and character-driven plot twists that seem both inevitable and surprising.” Familiarity with these patterns helps “sharpen conflicts between characters to make dramatic situations more compelling.”

The Enneagram—long a favorite guide among consultants, coaches, therapists, and spiritual teachers for leadership/team development and personal/spiritual growth—is not a quickie take on "types." These dimensions of human behavior and potential for spiritual growth have been known at least as long ago as Homer in 750 BCE (as shown by Michael J. Goldberg in Travels with Odysseus)* and as recently as neuropsychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.'s description in The Mindful Therapist of Patterns of Developmental Pathways or PDP.

As a writer and retired Enneagram coach/mentor, I’ll share some ideas to stimulate your thinking about character development. Whether writing about people you know in memoir or creating characters for fiction, you’ll benefit from deeper understanding of nine characteristic motivations, personality patterns, and growth potential.

First, a quick overview, then in posts that follow I delve deeper into each of the nine Enneagram points with examples from published works. Though we all have all patterns within us, we tend to be boxed in, or "fixated" in one of the nine until we develop deep self-awareness to break free of the habitual patterns associated with each. The same will be true of your fictional characters, and of family members and friends who appear in your creative nonfiction. Note that I'm not "typing" people mentioned in memoir or biography, only making guesses based on their observable behavior.

The brief paragraphs below show habitual patterns of behavior that predominate at points One though Nine (to go directly to the longer description, click on the link at "Point One," "Point Two," etc.). As in your own personal growth, a character arc would show an increase in self-awareness and freedom from the most automatic reactions, but the characters we're especially drawn to are often distinguished by their most obvious traits, including those we find a bit flawed. Think of your favorite books and you'll know exactly what I mean. 

Point One: The gift here is our ability to see and work toward perfection. Those of us more boxed in at this point tend to see first what’s wrong; perfectionism driven by a fix-it kind of anger, a rejection of something less than the ideal of what should be (Isabelle Goodrow in Elizabeth Strout's Amy & Isabelle; pianist Jeremy Denk in The New Yorker essay, "Every Good Boy Does Fine").

Point Two: The gift here is our ability to anticipate and tend to someone else’s needs. Those of us boxed in at this point can lose ourselves as we become too intent on taking care of others. Characters demonstrating this set of patterns find it difficult to admit their own needs and can become manipulative in their efforts to be "helpful" (Dennis Lynch in Alice McDermott's Charming Billy, Marge Piercy's recollections in Sleeping with Cats).

Point Three: The gift here is our drive to succeed in attaining a goal. When stuck at this point, we can become competitive strivers, such as Olympic athletes, but pushed to extremes this could rob us of our souls: with success measured in the eyes of others, and characters may be ruthless in search of their idealized goal  (Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley; Lennox Lewis in Melissa Mathison's biography, Lennox).

Point Four: The gift here is a passion for creativity, emotional depth, and a profound desire for authenticity. When boxed in at point Four, our need to be special is accompanied by a fear of being ordinary. Characters may be stuck in melancholy, feeling different or flawed (Diane Arbus in Arthur Lebow's biography Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, Sarah Woodruff in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

Point Five: The gift here is the ability to conceptualize and master knowledge. When stuck at point Five, we tend to value intellect more than the physical side of life. Characters reflecting these personality patterns may be socially remote or even awkward, and are typically conserving--of money, of emotions, of compliments (Robert Hendricks in Sebastian Faulks' Where My Heart Used to Beat, Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking).

Point Six: The gift here is loyalty, which causes those of us boxed in at this point to question our own inner power and to anxiously anticipate anything that could go wrong. Characters at point Six will look to some authority (the family, the social group, the company, the church, the society) for security, rules, and norms, yet paradoxically are often the ones to challenge authority (Flora 717 in Laline Paull's The Bees, Harry, Duke of Sussex in Spare).

Point Seven: The gift here is positive, energetic, upbeat energy, which can cause frustration when things slow down. When boxed in at point Seven, characters can be gluttons for pleasure, variety, and novelty to the point of having little tolerance for boredom or discomfort of any kind (Monica Szabo in Mary Gordon's Spending, Alan Cumming in Not My Father's Son, Matthew McConaughey in Greenlights).

Point Eight: The gift here is confidence and the ability to take charge. The boxed-in Eight claims power whether others like it or not. These characters will be driven to excess—more is better. The thrill is in the hunt, so they tend to stir things up to add spice to a situation (Javier Fuentes in Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt, V.I. Warshawski in Sara Paretsky’s Shell Game, Joyce Schulz in David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts).

Point Nine: The gift here is in being calm, easy-going, and understanding divergent opinions. Characters stuck at this point will avoid anything that could upset their sense of inner peace and they may be passive or passive aggressive (Charles Schulz in David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts, Louise Anderson in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight, Nathan Staples in A.L. Kennedy's Everything You Need).

This last description, of Enneagram point Nine, brings us back to the beginning quote describing Murdoch’s character Louise Anderson. Louise's calmness, gentleness, avoidance of conflict, speaking no evil, and disarming all hostility made her seem “weak, insipid, dull” to some people. But how interesting she is as a character.

_______________________

*"The Enneagram is rooted in a long and wide-ranging history of philosophic and theurgic traditions which describe a soul's journey of evolution and initiation. At each stop in the journey the soul confronts certain difficulties, or encounters some wisdom or power, or experiences a paradigm; from this the soul secures particular characteristics or learnings, or fails to and gets stuck . . . Homer must have known something of the relationships among the Enneagram types . . . because he knew the critical order.” Michael J. Goldberg, The 9 Ways of Working (pp. 340-341).

Impeccably Dressed: Point One

"Being the boss's secretary gave Isabelle Goodrow a status different from the other women in the room, but she was different anyway. For example, she was impeccably dressed; even in this heat she wore pantyhose . . . simply sat at her desk with her knees together, her shoulders back, and typed away at a steady pace."

In these few words from Elizabeth Strout's novel, Amy and Isabelle, we begin to see Isabelle's character, prim and perfectionistic.

As with all good writers, however, Strout doesn't rely on telling us about her character; she shows us with simple actions, as above and when Isabelle first arrives home from work:

"The geraniums on the windowsill over the sink had bright red heads of bloom the size of softballs, but two more leaves had turned yellow. Isabelle, dropping her keys on the table, noticed this immediately and went to pluck them off."

Isabelle Goodrow is a fine example of Enneagram point One, a set of characteristic personality patterns where attention goes to what needs fixing, as when Isabelle notices and immediately plucks two yellow leaves from the geraniums on the windowsill. This perfectionism is driven by a form of anger that rejects whatever fails to meet the ideal of what should be.

 

Judith Searle (The Literary Enneagram) describes the emotional constraint of this character type, a constraint we’ve already seen in Isabelle, sitting at her desk typing at a steady pace in the extreme heat. Searle further explains how characters at this point "tend to be unforgiving of mistakes—both their own and others'.” They believe others’ errors “arise from their moral defects” and “try to impose their will through moral superiority.”

So far, we've seen how Strout’s Isabelle fits this Enneagram point—self-disciplined, discerning, and avoiding mistakes. If this is in fact her key Enneagram style, we should hear judgments in her language and internal dialogue about what’s right and wrong, as well as a tinge of anger. These qualities become quite evident by page 14 of the novel, while she’s sitting at dinner with her 16-year-old daughter, Amy:

“Use your napkin, please.” She couldn’t help it: the sight of Amy licking ketchup from her fingers made her almost insane. Just like that, anger reared its ready head and filled Isabelle’s voice with coldness . . . and now Isabelle hated herself as well . . . Amy sat with her hand in her lap, her neck thrust forward like one of those foolish toy dogs you could sometimes see in the back of a car, whose head wagged back and forth at stop signs. “Oh, sit up straight,” Isabelle wanted to say, but instead she said wearily, “You may be excused. I’ll do the dishes tonight.”

As you explore point One in literature, you’ll see a range from the more self-aware, forgiving characters who even have a sense of humor (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs) to the most self-righteous and even cruel (Beth in Ordinary People, Stevens in The Remains of the Day). I encourage you to read Amy and Isabelle to decide for yourself how Isabelle’s character develops over time.

Be alert, also, for what Searle refers to as a “trap door” quality, a running-amok side that can provide temporary escape from trying to meet high standards (“they rigorously control expression of their feelings, but once the door is opened, their pent-up desires come flooding out”). Isabelle, too, has “a past.”

In addition to finding these characters in fiction, memoirs can teach you what someone boxed in here is like from the inside. In his personal essay in The New Yorker, “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” pianist Jeremy Denk describes the self-critic we all hear from at times that’s ever-present at point One:

"Very recently, during a recital in Philadelphia, I lifted my arm confidently to play a passage. A flurry of wrong notes rang out. I had a moment of panic, a quick intake of breath, and was beginning a litany of self-blame when I heard a voice in my head with a quaint Hungarian accent: 'The problem with you is that you’re a perfectionist.'”

Thomas Condon has extensive lists of famous people for each Enneagram point (e.g., Ralph Nader at point One--also in An Unreasonable Man) and Condon's book The Enneagram Movie & Video Guide will lead you to some older films that show each point in full (see Tom Wilkinson, The Full Monty). Observing character types in action will inform you in a way words can’t quite describe. 

I hope this post has piqued your curiosity with the basics of point One, which I promise you will now see everywhere. 

Poems for Point One

Emotional Resonance: Point Two

While searching for characters that exemplify point Two, I realized that even talented writers don’t always fully explore the motivations of their characters, however skillful their descriptions. As a result, we as readers feel less emotional resonance.

In Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, the narrator’s father Dennis Lynch shows what might be patterns typical at point Two — at best unconditionally loving, at worst compelled to help in order to feel needed. But McDermott provides only enough of the father’s history and inner dialogue to let us make an educated guess. For example, the narrator describes her father standing beside Billy’s widow Maeve after the family dinner following Billy’s funeral:

[He] would pay the bill and distribute the tips and take Maeve’s arm when she walked out to the limousine . . . He would promise to stop in to see her later in the evening, just to make sure she was all right. He would shake hands with everyone, thanking them for coming, agreeing it was unbelievable . . . 

Although Dennis had been Billy’s lifelong friend, who helped Maeve deal with Billy’s fatal drinking, Dennis' motivation for doing all this isn’t clear. His behavior seems to reflect this character type's instinctive responsiveness to others’ needs. He was always cleaning up after Billy, whose excuse for drinking was the death of his Irish love, Eve.

Only Dennis knew that Eve had not died. She’d jilted Billy and married her boyfriend in Ireland. Instead of this harsh truth, Dennis believed lying to Billy would “preserve his innocence”:

The rest of the family would have to hear about it, and Billy would have to endure for some months, maybe years, both their sympathy and their studied silence whenever the subject of love and marriage arose . . . better he be brokenhearted than trailed all the rest of his life by a sense of his own foolishness.

Dennis’ unilateral decision to protect Billy is a clue to the down side of point Two, a form of manipulation that fosters dependency in others as well as co-dependency ("I need for you to need me").*

At the extreme end of this aggressive style of helping is Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery. The book’s other main character, novelist Paul Sheldon, awakens from a drug-induced sleep to realize his legs are mangled but he’s not in a hospital. Instead, he’s immobilized, a prisoner of Annie, a former nurse and—she repeatedly assures him—his number one fan. Already ominous, the plot takes a darker turn when Annie finishes reading Paul’s most recent novel and learns he’s killed off a character she loves. Who can forget Kathy Bates as Annie in the movie version?

In her memoir Sleeping with Cats, Marge Piercy describes taking care of others much of her life. She even financially supported her second husband and two others in a ménage à quatre and bemoans how people have abandoned her when she’s needed them. Notice her emotional responsiveness in this passage about adopting two cats after her Siamese died:

[She and her third husband, Ira Wood] found heaps of Burmese . . . in piles of rich dark brown fur cuddling one another, except for two exiles: two big sable cats . . . Woody named the male Jim Beam, and I named the female Colette . . . Jim Beam was immediately interested and friendly, but Colette hid under a chair . . . I captured her, held her and licked her like a mother cat. She was astonished and began to purr. From then on, except when she was angry with me, she was my cat. She fell in love that night. It was hardly sanitary, but it conveyed affection and trust in a language she understood.

Licking a kitten, the way a mother cat would, is a fascinating metaphor for a character driven to take care of others. Piercy’s examples of her motives and behavior also show how character can be deepened in memoir as well as fiction.

When characters boxed in at point Two become overly flattering and people-pleasing, they lose sight of their own needs. Judith Searle points out this quality in Mrs. Ramsey, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

In Scotland for the summer with her family and assorted house guests . . . feeding them, making them feel valued, and using her superb social skills to encourage appropriate romantic matches . . . Mrs. Ramsay’s empathy is evident . . . she pushes aside her own feelings, especially her impatience with her husband. (Judith Searle, The Literary Enneagram, pp. 66-67)

We can be certain of Annie Wilkes as an exemplar of this character type, because its most unhealthy aspects are so clear. Marge Piercy’s memoir suggests that she shares this Enneagram point but is much more self-aware. In Mrs. Ramsey we find this point's strengths and blind spots in balance.

In Charming Billy, however, though we see Dennis Lynch as the big brother everyone can depend on, we aren’t shown enough inner dialogue or signs of motivation to be certain. We only have a hint of the inner conflict that's characteristic at point Two. If Dennis were more central and/or the author had wanted to divulge more about his psychological nature, why would that matter? Because readers connect with a character when they recognize some common ground, and this is made possible only when writers share their own dark emotions. The best-drawn characters are compelling. They create emotional resonance, a sock in the gut. We like or dislike, love or hate them.

By comparing Mrs. Ramsey to Marge Piercy and to Annie Wilkes, you can see how a novel or memoir could even include more than one character with the same motivations, each played out in a vastly different way. These personality tips will be most useful after your characters emerge in your mind and on the printed page. It’s our goal as writers to create recognizable personalities without allowing them to become stereotypical, known to the reader and distinguishable from other characters by unique history, behavior, and voice.

Poems for Point Two

*    *    *

*Whether familiar with the Enneagram or not, author McDermott gives a fully drawn portrait of the point Two character in the narrator of her more recent novel, Child of My Heart.

In The Limelight: Point Three

Knowing the nine Enneagram points, according to Judith Searle, can help deepen character descriptions in two key ways: (1) the range of characteristic responses and (2) the typical character arc for each (The Literary Enneagram: Introduction). 

The range at point Three includes responses showing a determined focus on success. These are hard-working, productive, ambitious, competitive, charismatic characters who are always in the limelight. They exemplify a basic human need for encouragement and affirmation that can become so exaggerated they’re alienated from themselves. Instead of allowing “what I want,” their attention goes to “what others expect of me.”

This drive to success is an effort to counter fears of failing, of not meeting others’ expectations. But characters at point Three dare not show insecurity, so they block off emotions while doing whatever it takes to succeed. Thus, less healthy characters at this Enneagram point will slip from being successful to appearing to be successful, as they cut whatever corners are necessary to keep up appearances.

In life and in fiction, the transformational character arc at point Three involves releasing the relentless drive to be the best. These characters become more authentic, with higher self-awareness, acting on their own values and wishes instead of what will make them look good to others.

Does that mean readers only like novels and memoirs that show such a positive, radical change? Of course not, and Veronica Sicoe has made a useful distinction among Change, Growth, or Fall Arcs:

• Change Arc—protagonist is positively transformed by the end of the story.
• Growth or Shift Arc—protagonist changes but not necessarily for the better, just different, or overcomes an internal block and upgrades somewhat.
• Fall Arc—protagonist declines significantly, dooming self and/or others.

Representing the Change and Shift Arcs are a number of biographies about championship boxers, who—like Olympic gold medal winners—could be a natural fit with Enneagram point Three. This seems true of Lennox Lewis, who won the world amateur junior boxing title, a Summer Olympics boxing gold medal, and world heavyweight championship. 

What clues suggest Lewis might represent point Three? In Lennox, when biographer Melissa Mathison asks, “What got you interested in boxing?” Lewis answers, “The trophies.” Mathison also describes Lewis as “one great dresser,” which is characteristic in that looking good is both metaphor and reality for this personality style. 

Most pertinent, Lewis’ attention is always turned toward winning. “I use visualization . . . mentally, you have to be very focused.” His apparent lack of psychological self-knowledge is also typical at point Three. The pressure to keep up the image leads to a tendency to “do” feelings and adopt a role with a script to follow. When asked what he wants people to know about him, Lewis seems at a loss: “That’s a difficult question. What would they want to know about me? What do I feel they ought to know? . . . I represent a certain type of people.” The question was unexpected. He had no script to follow.

But aren’t all championship boxers great dressers? Aren’t they all competitive? How do we distinguish among several aggressive types that might be successful boxers? Here we see the nuance of character in language used by other boxers at different Enneagram points:

• George Foreman has said, “Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it,” a use of metaphor more characteristic of point Seven. 
• Mike Tyson, in contrast is all about expecting the worst (“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”), sounding like point Six. 
• And Muhammad Ali speaks from the gut like point Eight: “It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.” 
• In contrast, Lewis’ description of boxing has a success-oriented, competitive focus: “It’s me trying to outdo the other person . . . the highly skilled are the ones that are successful.” 

The striving to impress others at point Three is a kind of self-deception to counter any fears of being a failure. At the far negative end of this drive, characters may be ruthless opportunists who will resort to anything that saves them from exposure. Here we have Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. 

After protagonist Tom Ripley befriends wealthy Dickie Greenleaf, he envies the Greenleaf’s luxurious lifestyle and wants it for his own. He eventually kills Dickie and assumes his identity, later resuming his own name and forging a will that makes him Dickie’s sole heir. Tom admits his greatest talent is “Forging signatures, telling lies . . . impersonating practically anybody.” When another character suggests he must feel tormented, Tom replies, “Don’t you just take the past and put it in a room in the basement, and lock the door and never go in there? That’s what I do.” 

Ripley’s path is definitely an example of a Fall Arc—a decline into breaking all the rules to foster his desired image—more evidence that a character arc does not have to be heroic to entrance readers and sell books.

To extend this exploration, Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith describes Patricia  Highsmith’s fictional males, especially Tom Ripley, as versions of herself. Jeanette Winterson’s review of Schenker’s biography summarizes: “Concealment was her game and her way of life.” Highsmith traveled in search of fresh encounters and forged, fabricated, or outright lied. Her diaries indicate she was only six years old when she began to have “evil thoughts” about the “murder of my stepfather . . . And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions. In adolescence, therefore, I was oddly in command of myself.”

Hmmm. So, at some point you’ll consider what Enneagram point has held you most captive, to see how you’ve stamped your characters with a bit of yourself and might have limited your point of view by not considering other styles. If none of the three I’ve written about so far seems familiar, you’re sure to recognize your image among the six more to follow.

(See also Clarence Thomas in "Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power, and the Supreme Court)

Poems for Point Three

Marrying Shame: Point Four

The emotional tone at point Four is associated with drama,  lending itself beautifully to creative writing. Depictions of these characters convey their longing, moodiness, discontent, anguish, and/or artistic temperament. 

The transformational character arc at point Four brings authenticity, a spaciousness of heart where emotions are felt as a natural truth, without rejecting or drowning in them.

While point Four's passionate creativity, emotional depth, and profound desire to be unique can be gifts, this narrow focus of attention can also create the fear of being ordinary. Because mundanity is anathema, these characters constantly seek new ways to perceive the world. Paradoxically, seeing the everyday world as banal means always feeling like an outsider, so there's constant tension between wanting to belong and wanting to be different, between feeling special or feeling flawed. 

As a young art student, photographer Diane Arbus would look at a model and draw what none of the other students saw. She later said, "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them" Famous for her "chillingly provocative" photos of people who stretched the margins of "normality" for her time, she felt that anything she did easily could not be good. "I didn't want to be told I was terrific. I had the sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn't worth doing."

Arthur Lubow, in his 2016 biography Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, describes her affinity for symbols that's characteristic at point Four: "She was drawn to the things that would be true in any time and place, the customs and rituals that notwithstanding their individuality, were emblematic, oneiric, mythic."

Note Lubow's description of a paper Arbus wrote during her senior year for an honors humanities seminar:

"She reconfigured the assigned reading into patterns as personal as the whorls of her thumbprints. Through her eyes the Western classics were transformed into personal meditations--on the differences between men and women, the ways in which people succumb to their fates, and the allure of death to those who are unable to inhabit their lives. The light she cast on these works of literature was idiosyncratic, but more than just reflection of her own complex personality, it was, like a flare in a dim room, eccentrically and unevenly illuminating" (p. 24). 

Arbus committed suicide in 1971, when she was only 48 years old. Though somewhat a surprise and certainly a shock to those who cared for her, she'd had depressive periods throughout her life. Lubow suggests her anguish was due in part to self-doubt. During a relatively happy year in Europe with her husband Allan Arbus, for example, "she had been felled by recurring spells of despair, of feeling 'gloomy and haunted with guilty echoes of what I should be doing and why I am not.'"  

Biographies, memoirs, and other forms of creative nonfiction are more engaging to read when self-descriptions, sample works, others' observations, characteristic dialogue, and internal thoughts expand our understanding of the subject's personality. The same is perhaps even more true when writing fiction, because we want readers to connect in some way with characters we introduce.

Certainly, this is true of Sarah Woodruff in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. A psychological study as much as it is a romance, Fowles highlights Sarah's individualist character, her basic isolation and self-awareness as someone who can't be defined by conventional roles. He creates an unforgettable image of Sarah, dressed all in black, standing on the edge of a cliff:

"We knew she was alive a fortnight after this incident, and therefore she did not jump. Nor were hers the sobbing, hysterical sort of tears that presage violent action; but those produced by a profound conditional, rather than emotional, misery -- slow-welling, unstoppable, creeping like blood through a bandage" (page 103).

Charles Smithson's initial impression of Sarah further paints her isolation and mournfulness:

"Standing at the center of the road, Charles watched her black back recede. All he was left with was the after-image of those eyes -- they were abnormally large, as if able to see more and suffer more. And their directness of look -- he did not know it, but it was the tract-delivery look he had received -- contained a most peculiar element of rebuffal. Do not come near me, they said. Noli me tangere" (page 96).

Sarah's own thoughts show her struggle between feeling special and feeling flawed: 

"I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant's Whore--oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in this land. I could not marry that man. So I married shame . . . I knew no other way to break out of what I was . . . What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women . . . sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand" (page 185). 

Neither of these authors is likely to have knowingly used the Enneagram to inform their work. But its application is popular among filmmakers, playwrights, novelists, and memoirists because the nine personality descriptions capture in depth what the best writers depict through their own genius for understanding what makes people tick. 

So, let's say a protagonist you're creating matches qualities at point Four and you want to show a believable character arc. Angela Quarles suggests combining a character's personality with Larry Brooks' Three Dimensions of Character Development ("What the world sees, even if it's all a smoke screen for dark and deeply hidden secrets, is an amalgamation of their best and worst essences"):  

1. First, show your character's surface traits, quirks, and habits. Characters at point Four have a self-image as someone who's basically flawed, with a focus on suffering, emotional sensitivity and empathy, aesthetic sensibility, and a push-pull pattern in relationships (idealizing the lover, until reality sets in). These characteristics are quite evident in the early pages of The French Lieutenant's Woman, with Sarah Woodruff's sobs "creeping like blood through a bandage."
2. Second, provide the back story and your character's inner demons; what prompts, explains, and motivates this character? Those at point Four nurture a "story" about not being sufficiently loved and focus on what's missing or lacking. ("What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women.")
3. Third, how would this personality's true character emerge through choices made when something important is at stake? By the end of The French Lieutenant's Women, Sarah Woodruff is different from many women and unafraid to be so. An assistant and model for a well-known artist, she's developed equanimity, the highest gift at point Four: she is unmarried and unconcerned about conventional Victorian attitudes toward her single state.

At this point, you've been introduced briefly to all nine Enneagram points, then more in-depth views of point One ("Impeccably Dressed"), Two ("Emotional Resonance"), Three ("In the Limelight"), and now Four ("Marrying Shame"). Continue to read the remaining posts and you'll have a great tool to create life-like, multifaceted, relevant characters.

(See also David Yaffe's Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell.)

Poems for Point Four

Mind Games: Point Five

Earlier in these essays I suggested considering which Enneagram point most closely describes your primary personality patterns, to see how you might have unwittingly stamped your characters with a bit too much of yourself and limited your point of view.  

In Sebastian Faulkes' HumanTraces and Where My Heart Used to Beat, the background information and characters' conversations often sound like the dissertations that are typical of point Five's talk style. Characters at point Five are introverted, mentally active people who dislike having demands placed on them and prefer to examine their emotions in private, after the fact, living self-sufficient lives with plenty of alone time,

Of course, our writer's voice is important; we want readers to recognize us, but not to the point that our characters all sound like us. Note the conversation on p. 158 of Where my Heart Used to Beat, where Valerian tells Richard how the war wound Richard hasn’t been able to remember actually occurred:

“. . . There was some fierce rifle and machine gun fire, and you were keen to go over into the enemy trench . . . there was a struggle between you and Shenton. He said you’d gone berserk. As you started to climb out of the trench he shot you through the shoulder . . . He said it was the only way to save your life.”

 

There was silence in the study. I pushed my mind back to that shell-holed winter landscape. I didn’t remember being shot from behind, but neither did I not remember . . . There was nothing to rule the story out. Shenton was hard and quick thinking; this kind of thing would not have been beyond him.”

Faulkes is a prolific, highly regarded British novelist with many awards, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and this essay is in no way meant to disparage his talents. We're simply exploring the personalities of his characters, particularly Richard in Where My Heart Used to Beat, and noticing how Richard processed this above information intellectually, completely without reference to his emotions. It’s a gift of characters at point Five to conceptualize and master knowledge, but this high value for intellect tends to dominate the physical and emotional sides of life. 

Reviews of another Faulkes novel, Human Traces, support the possibility that he may have woven a lot of himself into his characters, at least in the works cited here:
 

"Overall, despite the novel's many felicities, I was left feeling that Sebastian Faulks' desire to present complex ideas and arguments sometimes stretches the fictional form to, if not beyond, its limits." (Jane Stevenson, "The Way Madness Lies," The Guardian, September 3, 2005)

 

". . . a long, encyclopedic novel, sprawling over decades and continents, employing an expansive cast and packing in many themes and theories in the form of didactic digressions: speeches, papers, monologues . . . Faulks sometimes force-feeds his characters' dialogue to convey background information." (Steven Heighton, "Head Cases," New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 15, 2006) 

In Dialogue: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Effective Dialogue, Gloria Kempton writes that a character at point Five is “the one standing off to the side watching, observing, taking notes, reading, thinking, and playing mind games . . . In a scene of dialogue, this character can often seem withdrawn, detached, and even arrogant. She is definitely an introvert." (p. 90).

This could as well be a description of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who particularly demonstrates the degree to which characters illustrating aspects of point Five can be emotionally remote and socially awkward. Of course. her history of enduring abuse has earned her the right to keep her distance from others and to bestow trust only very, very cautiously. Salander’s keen intelligence is reflected in her love of puzzles and her high-level technical sleuthing; she has a photographic memory and calms herself by mentally solving advanced mathematical equations.

In creative nonfiction, Joan Didion stands out for her highly intelligent essays and keen observation of political and social dynamics. Her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking could be a treatise on the difficulty for some at point FIve in dealing with grief. On December 30, 2003, her husband John Gregory Dunne died from a massive coronary event when their only child Quintana had been in tensive care for five nights with pneumonia and septic shock: 

“This is a case in which I need more than the words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself” (p. 8).

Of course, she does experience terrible grief: 

". . . in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

Then she retreats again to intellect: 

“Virtually everyone who experiences grief mentions this phenomenon of waves . . . Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the fact, when I woke alone in the apartment” (p. 27).

Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris is often cited as an exemplar of point Five personality traits, but we shouldn’t extrapolate that to mean this personality is any more or less likely to slip into madness, only to consider Lecter as somewhat of a caricature of the loss to human potential when completely separating head from heart. 

Laurie R. King has a compelling series of detective novels that feature Mary Russell as the reimagined partner (and eventually wife) of Sherlock Holmes. In Dreaming Spies, Mary recalls driving home on a dark rainy night: 

“To keep myself awake, I recited mathematical formulae, irregular verbs, and poetry. Haiku was ideal for the purpose, being both mathematical and poetic . . . (p. 11). 

Later in the book she and Homes engage in one of their favorite pastimes, quoting Shakespeare to each other (p. 48). 

In the transformational arc at point Five these characters learn to live in the present, coming down from a level of abstraction into the ordinary world, with a flow between themselves and others in which they receive more and give more, In this respect, it's of interest that Judith Searle, in The Literary Enneagram, mentions Mary Russell among several "healthy" Eight characters, not Five, and provides a number of quotes from The Beekeeper's Apprentice to make her point. Searle may be right that this character shows more Eight qualities than Five qualities. I'll just note that when a character is healthy, not boxed in so tightly to the unconscious patterns that identify a point on the Enneagram, you'll see positive qualities of all the points. 

Also, if you explore how various sources "type" fictional characters, you'll find some disagreement. The point of learning the Enneagram is not so you must create characters that are "perfect" examples of one of the nine points, but simply to explore how you might deepen the descriptions and dialogue of your own characters.

Poems for Point Five

Hive Rules: Point Six

This is the part of us that belongs to a family, a group, a society. And there are always some personal freedoms we're asked to give up to ensure the group's survival. At point Six, you'll find characters who follow the rules almost blindly or--in contrast--those who are always challenging the rules. Either way, their social surroundings matter a great deal, and they can be committed, engaging characters who bring out the best in the family or team.

Typically good troubleshooters who make sure they've considered everything that might go wrong, these characters can also become defensive or even paranoid. (If you're looking for what could go wrong, you'll always find something to worry about.)

Point Six reflects, according to Russ Hudson, our need to know a kind of stability, a kind of inner ground where we can breathe deeply, to do whatever it takes to feel safe and grounded for a time. Part of this orientation is to know how things work, to figure out the rules and social structure. There's also a desire to be part of something that endures. But the world is not safe, so there's always doubt. "What if I've forgotten something? What if there's danger here?" That creates a vigilance that can be so highly intuitive it becomes precognition.

There's a term popular on the internet, "hive mind," where a large number of people can develop collective intelligence, but may also reach uncritical conformity. Laline Paull's novel The Bees quite literally depicts a hive mind. This author's bee hive is a highly regimented matriarchy, a stern religious order where members often repeat the main decree: "Accept, obey, and serve."

Paull's main character, Flora 717, is born unusually large and able to speak, unlike other floras, whose strict and sole role is sanitation, the lowest caste in the hive. In this most rigid of social systems, a monarchy, each individual has a prescribed lifetime job. Survival is a constant concern in the hive, and throughout the novel Flora shows both prototypes of point Six--the "phobic," fearful side and the "counterphobic" tendency to break the rules. She carries within her both obedience and rebellion.

It's the highest law of the hive, punishable by death, that only the Queen may breed; thus, it's a sin for a worker to lay eggs. In fact, any difference from assigned roles and capabilities is punishable by death. As Flora is cleaning up after her own birth and awaiting inspection, dark figures stride down the corridor to a nearby, newly hatched bee, one--whose wings have a shriveled edge--had run away from them because she knew they would kill her:

"You fled inspection."

"Spare me," she cried. "I will not fly, I will serve in any other way."

"Deformity is evil. Deformity is not permitted."

A character's maturation at point Six shows greater personal integrity and courage vs. blindly following the rules, and Flora's developing self-confidence, abilities, and courage perfectly convey this growth arc. For example, her ability to catch scents is similar to point Six's highly developed "antennae" for what could go wrong.

Here's a scene after Flora has bravely fought an intruding wasp, definitely not part of her limited role from birth, but the queen's ladies can't dictate her death because she's saved the hive. In the following conversation you'll also hear condescension and "othering" that are similar to racism: 

"So shocking," Lady Burnet offered her water to drink. "But how wonderfully you speak. I can understand nearly every word. Not like a flora at all. Now, if only you did not look it! Ladies, it would be a fitting tribute, would it not, for her bravery? 

Would you like that, my dear?"

 "To change my kin?"

"And lose your wonderful heritage" Lady Burnet laughed. "Goodness me, no! But we might disguise it a little."

When they had exhausted their skills with grooming, pomade, and propolis, the ladies trained Flora in how to sit and rise, but were forced to let her splaying curtsy go uncorrected, for there was nothing to be done with that.

Some of my favorite scenes are of Flora in the dance hall, the room where the forager bees alert the others where to find food, all of this communicated through rapturous dance. There is also humor here: the male bees--preening, strutting drones--are hilarious sex fiends:

"Think now of those foreign princesses waiting for us. How fatigued, how impatient for love must they be? Would you bind them in chastity a single moment longer? Or shall we fill our bellies with the strength of this hive, then free them with our swords?"

This is accompanied by a suitably lewd gesture. 

In a different royal setting, we have Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. Of course, we are not "typing" him, but looking for how well his likely character type can be drawn in selections from his memoir, Spare. Though ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, much of Spare's content is presented in Harry's voice, in direct quotes, where his interests, behaviors, and reactions become quite clear.

Because we know so much about Harry’s life, we can see the genesis of one of the most identifying qualities of point Six—questioning one’s own inner power/looking to an authority for direction, yet paradoxically challenging authority, as we saw in Flora 717. We also see the push/pull that’s typical at point Six—wanting to resolve issues with his father and brother, yet sharing information that’s guaranteed to annoy them, such as private email messages between Megan and Kate, as if he hasn’t just placed another barrier between them.

Characters at point Six struggle between fearfulness and courage. Harry is very open about his fearfulness, starting when he was a child.

“I pulled the sheets and covers to my chin, because I didn’t like the dark. No, not true, I loathed the dark. Mummy did too, she told me so . . . I always insisted on the door being left open a crack . . .”

And who wouldn’t have a touch of paranoia, being hounded by the press from the time he was a little boy and knowing how the press pursued his mother. His courage developed in his military career, where he ended up piloting rescue helicopters, one of the most dangerous jobs.

Also characteristic at point Six is a mental jockeying, back and forth, back and forth. Hamlet is one of the most often cited characters with this dynamic (“To be or not to be”). A tragic example of this tortured thinking in Harry is how, following Diana’s death, he actually convinced himself she wasn’t dead; she had concocted the story of her death and gone into hiding:

“This was all a trick. And for once the trick wasn’t being played by the people around me, or the press, but by Mummy. Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. She’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away.”

 “Of course! It’s a ruse, so she can make a clean start!” . . . Then doubt crept in . . . Then back to relief. . . Then doubt again . . . Then relief . . .”

 “She’s gone. No, she’s hiding. She’s dead. No. she’s playing dead.”

When their Aunt Sarah brought Harry and William each a lock of hair she’d clipped from Diana’s body, Harry thought to himself,

“She’s really gone.” 

Then almost immediately, “No, this could be anybody’s hair. Mummy, her beautiful blond hair intact, was out there somewhere. I’d know if she weren’t. My body would know. My heart would know.”

Harry never fully accepted Diana’s death until he was grown and went to see the tunnel where the accident happened.

We also see in Harry's self-descriptions how the numbers to either side of a point, called the "wings," can provide nuance to a character's inner thoughts, actions, and dialogue. We've just taken a look at point Five, and it's clear in Harry's memoir that the qualities associated with Five are not strongly present in his character. He states very clearly that he's not the intellectual his father Charles is:

“Study, concentration, requires an alliance with the mind, and in my teen years I was waging all-out war with mine . . . when I was forced to sit quietly with a book—I freaked out. . . the whole basis of education was memory. . . but . . . my memory had een spotty since Mummy disappeared . . . and I didn’t want to fix it, because memory equaled grief. . . What troubled Pa most was how I went out of my way to avoid books. He didn’t merely enjoy books, he exalted them. Especially Shakespeare.”

In contrast, the qualities of point Seven seem to be a strong influence in Harry. Point Seven's psychological defense against childhood pain is to deny it and focus on the positive. and if you search the internet for more information about the Enneagram or about Prince Harry, you'll find that some people even "type" him at Seven.

It's true that he loves to play with children, loves to make his mates laugh, and you've probably read about his drinking and other exploits when he was younger. His apparent issues seem to be mostly at point Six, though, with that push-pull thinking in many areas of his life, strong alliance with his social groups (mates in school and in the Army), a very strong bond with his wife Megan, conflict with "the institution," and how he shows both fear (of the dark) and courage (in Afghanistan).

Ironically, the bane of Harry's existence--hounding by the media--seems to foretell this key preoccupation at point Six. His brother Will is quoted in Spare as having told Harry "You're delusional," referring to Harry's belief that the palace is planting stories in the media to make Charles, Will, and Kate look good, at Harry and Megan's expense.

When still at point Six but more self-observing, characters are highly family-oriented in personal life and team-oriented at work, energetic, attending to interdependent needs, using group-oriented language, challenging in ways that hold others accountable, bringing out the best in everyone. This latter quality, Harry’s desire that his royal family explore their beliefs, so they understand he’s not calling them racist; he only wants them to look at their unconscious bias . . . and, I’m tempted to say, then everything will be resolved. 

Poems for Point Six