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?" (See also Schnebly's article in the April 2025 issue of Enneagram Monthly).

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.

Enneagram Point One

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*"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).

Wish Fulfillment: Point Seven

Characters here are enthusiastic, curious, optimistic, adventurous, uninhibited, and can also become manic, scattered, and/or easily bored and dissatisfied.

Peter Pan is one of the most often cited literary characters at point Seven, and it's easy to think of them as a bit lightweight, but that's oversimplifying a psychological constellation that's as potentially deep as any other.

With their positive, upbeat energy, these characters are typified by Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, which inspired a movie, as did Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, strengthening the image of these characters as fun loving, sometimes slightly looney, their irreverence played out even to the point of self-harm, as with Larry McMurtry in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Though this image can seem somewhat superficial, the imagination and possibility thinking typical of characters at point Seven can include great inventors, facile court lawyers, mesmerizing teachers, and inspiring public figures.

For example, you can watch Matthew McConaughey giving an impassioned speech for gun reform in a White House briefing about the Uvalde school shootings--his voice is somewhat boyish, but you can see his strength and emotional depth as he talks about visiting the victims' families with his wife Camilla in Uvalde, where he grew up.

McConaughey's memoir Greenlights, though, offers life lessons on how to get to and stay on the bright side of life and not let hard times hold you back. He's turned 50 and wants to share his poems, aphorisms, and "bumper stickers." In the introduction he writes:

"This is not a traditional memoir . . . I am here to share stories, insights, and philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it . . . I'm an optimist by nature . . . I step in shit all the time and recognize it when I do. I've just learned how to scrape it off my boots and carry on . . . Any hardship, any pause we too, any intervention, interruption . . . they have greenlight assets that will be revealed to us later" (Greenlights, p. 3).

So, basically, Matthew McConaughey wants to teach us how to scrape shit off our boots and carry on! That's what drives characters at point Seven.

If you have a friend or partner, or otherwise know someone who represents this Enneagram point, you'll know how almost every conversation can be transporting, how you find yourself telling secrets you thought you'd never share, because point Seven's energy is so engaging, so much fun to be around, as if you, too, have just tasted the most exquisite chocolate and you want to celebrate. That's the tone of almost every page in Mary Gordon's Spending: A Utopian Divertimento.

Spending is narrated in the voice of Monica Szabo. A fairly successful artist, Monica meets a collector of her art whom she refers to throughout the novel as "B," the first letter of a name she doesn't share initially. B is a wealthy commodities trader who offers to pay for her to take a year off from her job and just paint, which she accepts, and they also become lovers.

Here's a scene where Monica is getting ready to paint, describing how she feels in a way I found sexier than the sex scenes:

"I was much happier the minute I began touching tubes of paint. Because what's more delightful in this world than color? When I give myself over to color, I'm back in the time before words, a time of childish delight. Who understands green better than a baby crawling through grass, surrounded by green grass but without the words for either green or grass. When I'm working with color, I become that child without words. Everything is more alive; everything seems saturated with and by color, and I'm saturated . . ." (Spending, p. 133)

The heightened focus on appetites of all kinds is the same kind of "addiction" we see at any Enneagram point when a character unconsciously plays out a circumscribed theme. At point Seven this drive can especially seem like an escape from reality and often is quite literally an escape from a troubled childhood.

Consequently, these characters can't tolerate any loss of freedom because it closes the psychological doors to their escape from old hurts. Monica's insistence on freedom becomes clear on page 105 where she's feeling anger toward B for giving her so much that he could take away at any time, and now he's agreed to pose for her paintings of Spent Men:

"When I feel I ought to be grateful, when I feel a sense of obligation, I turn into a rebellious slave. I will destroy the cotton gin or set the plantation on fire. I will overturn the galley, I will incite my fellow rowers to bloody revolt.

I was ready to pick a fight with him the minute I heard the buzzer ring downstairs. I stood in the door frame looking belligerent. But then, the sight of him was always pleasing to me. As he came into the light, closer to me, I had to work to feel antagonistic. And then there was his smell . . . the minute my nose hit the collar of his coat, my objections to him melted. I was a happy animal . . ."

Often, the enjoyment of characters at point Seven must match a heightened image of the "best" or the "most tasteful." For example, we don't find out until the next to the last page that "B" as she calls her wealthy benefactor and lover, is named Bernard, or Bernie, a name she hasn't wanted to mention for 300 pages because, "What kind of name is that for the hero of a great love affair? What kind of name is that to be calling out in a paroxysm of inextinguishable passion? Bernie . . ."

Some reviewers have faulted Mary Gordon for the "airy" nature of Spending, the very quality that makes it such a good example of point Seven's style. A reviewer on Amazon recommends that Gordon "grow up," and Kirkus Review calls it "entertaining but ultimately disappointing with its annoyingly moony detailings of the pair's interminable sex play."

A perfect example of point Seven in memoir is Alan Cumming's Not My Father's Son. Cumming's insight into his own psyche and willingness to share his understanding provide a clear trajectory from his childhood with an extremely abusive father to a famed acting career in film, TV, and stage, in such iconic roles as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret, as well as writer, producer, activist, and New York City club owner, an adulthood where he's recognized by his dimples and gorgeous smile:

"I am referred to often as having a childlike quality, or being pixilike. At first, when these sorts of descriptions began to be attributed to me, I didn't like them . . . Eventually I began to feel more comfortable with it all. Childlike, I realized, tends to mean open, joyous, maybe a bit mischievous, and I am happy to have all those qualities." (p. 124)

He was lucky to have a loving mother who countered his father's abuse and who eventually was able to leave with Alan and his brother Tom. This was not soon enough, though, for Alan's psychological safety, and he repressed most memories of his childhood terror until a nervous breakdown at age 28. He'd just begun rehearsals to play Hamlet on the stage:

"Spending so much time thinking about the concepts of being a father and being a son and trying to interpret the slow trickle of memories and feelings about my own silent childhood soon made it very difficult for me to engage with my friends in the cast   . . ." (p. 150)

After working through these memories, he and his brother went to their child-hood home to confront their father, which released even more of the qualities we associate with point Seven, but now with a healthier spin:

"Tom and I had traveled up to the estate to speak to him about our childhood. It did not go well. But the ensuing silence and absence of him from our lives because of this confrontation enabled us both to move on . . . I found myself embracing the childhood I felt I had missed. My flat began to fill with games I had either played as a boy or lusted after. I discovered I loved the color yellow and so I had all my walls painted in a bright shade of it . . . I started to collect marbles again . . ." (p. 124)

Cumming last spoke to his father from his dressing room while preparing for his role as MC in the Broadway show, Cabaret. This passage shows both psychological strength and ownership of his deep sense of play (p. 217):

"'Okay, take care. I'll talk to you soo--' I stopped. What was I saying? If ever there was a time for the truth it was now.

'Actually, I won't be speaking to you again, but take care.'

'Aye,' was the last thing my father ever said to me.

'Bye,' I said and hung up. I looked up at myself in the mirror of my trailer. I had just had the most horrible conversation of my life, and the very last conversation I would ever have with my tormentor. I was free of him at last. I wonder what he would have done had he known that during that conversation, I was wearing high heels, a bra and panties, and a full face of makeup.'" (p. 217, Not My Father's Son)

Enneagram Point Eight