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).

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. Richard hasn’t been able to remember how his war wound actually occurred and Valerian is trying to help him recall:

“. . . 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 in dealing with grief when stuck at point Five. On December 30, 2003, Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne died from a massive coronary event during the same time period when their adult child Quintana had been in intensive 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, Didion does experience terrible grief: 

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

But she then retreats 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 Holmes 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.

Enneagram Point Six