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

_______________________

*"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 that 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. 

Enneagram Point Two

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

Hive Rules: Point Six

Enneagram point Six 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 in order to ensure the group's survival. At 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 the racism that's typical of some groups: 

"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.”

On the other side of point Six, the qualities of point Seven also 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 as drawn out in Spare, however, seem to be mostly at point Six, 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. 

Enneagram Point Seven

No Place to Rest: Point Eight

This is the part of us that steps up and takes charge when we have to, that can shoulder whatever responsibility is required because there's no one else who can or will. Characters stuck at point Eight are more aggressively controlling and unwilling to acknowledge vulnerability. 

Even in tyrants though, there can be one person to whom they show a soft heart. Underlying this pattern is a childhood where there seemed to be no safe place to rest one's head. Very early in life, people at point Eight realized they had to take care of themselves. 

A character who shows this strength that covers fear of weakness is Javier Fuentes in Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt. Kingpen of a Mexican narcotics cartel, Javier is also charming and intelligent, loves to read, and regrets the role he's grown into, protesting that circumstances forced him into it. He often visits a bookstore in Acapulco and engages the owner Lydia Perez in conversation about their mutual favorite books, without her knowing his occupation. She grows to love him as a dear friend; he falls in love with her. 

Lydia's husband, Sebastian, is a journalist who is determined to publish the truth about the cartels, even though others have been killed for doing so. When he publishes an article fingering Fuentes, Sebastian and Lydia's entire extended family are murdered during a birthday party celebration in their back yard; only Lydia and their son Luca happen to have been inside in the bathroom and managed to hide. The rest of the novel centers on Lydia's attempts to escape Acapulco with Luca and hopefully to find their way to the U.S. and a long-lost uncle there.

Lydia and Luca hide in a hotel room, but only briefly because they know the cartel is looking for them to finish the job of killing Sebastian's family. The message that Javier sends to their hotel room is so telling about point Eight: "Your suffering will be brief." This is the kindness he offers to a woman he loves: that she and her son will simply be killed, not tortured at length!

It's common to think of men at point Eight, but there are many strong women in life and in fiction. I especially like V.I. Warsahwski to represent this point in fiction because I so admire the author, Sara Paretsky, who has changed the face of contemporary crime fiction. Not only has she created a strong woman with heart in V.I. Warshawski, but she also founded Sisters in Crime, an organization devoted to "helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction."

A few excerpts from Shell Game show Warshawski's strength and social consciousness. She is following up on a project for a client that requires checking out a neighborhood where the men wear kufis or Sikh turbans and the women are dressed in hijab:

"When people saw me watching the building, they moved fast: only an immigration officer could be staring at them so intently. I felt a flush of shame, shame that I was inspecting people as if they were specimens, shame that my government could create such fear in people . . . None of your business anyway, I snarled at myself on the road home" *pp. 47-48).

Warshawski shows the growing self-awareness that characterizes any of us when we begin to take the difficult first steps out of the strictures of our childhood programming:

". . . I went into the bedroom to dress. A poster-size photo of my mother hangs there, Gabriella on the brink of a concert comeback before ovarian cancer ravaged her . . . I touched the glass over my mother's face as I passed. It's been thirty years and still Harmony's chance comment could send a spasm of grief through me. There are no balance scales to loss: my mother's too-young death, Clarissa vanishing in the present . . . All these losses are an opening into an abyss. When we start falling in, it's hard to climb back up" (pp. 69-70).

Warshawski can be as tough as is necessary. She refers to her eyes when she's angry as "Death Star eyes." She also has a sense of humor that's not uncommon at point Eight. For example, when her lover Murray Ryerson tries to find out the name of her current client, she says:

"It's a terrible secret, Ryerson, so this is completely off the record, but I was protecting Kim Jong-Un's love child with Dennis Rodman" (p. 105)

In Paretsky's memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, she says her literary career was born out of the conviction that it ought to be possible to "create a woman who was a person, not an angel or a monster," and that's who we find in Warshawski:

"I carried my breakfast with me in the car and ate in a precarious and unhealthy way, swallowing fruit and yogurt at traffic lights, choking on toast crumbs, spilling coffee on my coat. When I finally parked across the street from the Rest EZ branch, I looked as though I'd been wrestling in a restaurant dumpster. I also hadn't combed my hair or bothered with my makeup. I dealt with my hair, but didn't try painting my face, just removed as much food as I could from my clothes" (Shell Game, pp. 113-114).

The concerns of characters at point Eight are typically big ones. In Warshawski's case we've already seen her sensitivity to dangers for people in a subculture. Here's how she describes her ex-husband in their brief marriage the summer after law school:

"For some reason, I'd thought Dick shared my passion for social justice. For some reason, Dick thought I shared his passion for his career. We'd both been hideously wrong, but we stuck it out for twenty-seven months, while he kept trying to make me act like the wife of an upcoming associate and I'd tried to make him act as though he cared about people at the bottom of the food chain" (p. 128).

For an example in nonfiction, I draw from Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis' deeply researched biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz, because Schulz and his first wife Joyce demonstrate how two different Enneagram points in a relationship can push themselves more and more into their boxes if they don't pay attention and talk about how they're hooking each other. 

You'll see in the next post that Schulz, called "Sparky" by everyone who knew him, seems to have been stuck more and more at point Nine. Here we see that Joyce, as portrayed in others' recollections, was reflecting the dynamics that are typical of point Eight: 

A visitor noticed, "He was all warm and gentle. She was a tough broad" (p. 304)

"He really never did stand up to her when she pushed" (p. 315).

"His abdication pressed Joyce by default into absolute authority with the children . . . Leaving Joyce to do the hard parenting by herself only widened the rift between them as a couple . . . Joyce dictated to Sparky in front of other people" (p. 368).

Though she was deeply hurt by Sparky's affair with the woman who would become his second wife, Joyce wasn't going to show weakness. She did go to a therapist but never revealed to Schulz how deeply hurt she felt. "'I did all my crying in the psychologist's office,' she said years later" (p. 464).

Enneagram Point Nine

Not a Strong Drink: Point Nine

Characters at Point Nine range from being peaceful, reassuring, and empathic, to complacent, neglectful, and avoidant of anything that disturbs their peace. This is the part of us that wants a life free of worries, a world free of conflict. At best, characters at point Nine are able to understand and help resolve divergent opinions.

At base, though, these patterns evolved in order to avoid conflict, which leads to following other people's agendas and forgetting one's own. Characters stuck here will avoid anything that could upset their equilibrium, and they may be passive or passive-aggressive.

In great detailing of cartoonist Charles Schulz's personality, biographer David Michaelis spent almost a decade researching and writing Schulz and Peanuts, referred to in the previous section. I especially like this biography because it shows very clearly how the patterns of people from two different Enneagram points interact. Unless romantic partners are mindful of where each may hook the other's most automatic responses, they can push each other into even more contained aspects of their personality patterns. 

To carry through with the suggestion of Joyce Schulz at point Eight and Charles (called "Sparky" by everyone who knew him) at point Nine, a close family friend said, "He couldn't cope with things that weren't positive; he didn't like confrontation."

Characters stuck at point Nine have difficulty presenting themselves in public. There's a kind of "Who, me?" quality to their self-image. A number of quotes on page 384 of Michaelis' biography show this quality:

"The more visible Schulz became, the more threatening the world seemed . . . His one clear symptom was a chronically upset stomach . . . Asked from the floor at a meeting of cartoonists and comedy writers in San Francisco in 1969, ' Does it frighten you to see that the times reflect you rather than the other way around?' Sparky 'looked up sheepishly,' according to one observer and said, 'Everything frightens me' . . ."

He was increasingly afraid to go anywhere.

Sparky's second wife, Jeannie "was going to great lengths to shield him from aggressiveness . . . Part of his relief and pleasure in her 'niceness' was in direct proportion to Joyce's infamous bossiness. Sparky and Jeannie founded their marriage on a nonaggression pact . . . After they were married, Jeannie traveled the world, but Sparky's fear kept him home."

 In essence, Schulz was Charlie Brown . . . poor Charlie Brown.

A beautifully wrought character who plays out point Nine is Louise Anderson in Iris Murdoch's novel, The Green Knight. Louise's husband Teddy has died of cancer, and she's been loved from afar by Teddy's friend Clement:

"He had fallen in love when he had first set eyes on her, when Teddy Anderson had introduced her as his fiancee . . . Had he imagined that he saw in her eyes some special understanding, some kinship? . . . What he saw might have been her pity for him, her sympathy. Or perhaps just her kindness, the way in which, ever after as he watched her, 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 extends far beyond the usual guidelines for deepening character descriptions She  begins building Louise's character on page 1, describing a scene with her friend Joan back when they had been in boarding school together:

"Joan had been expelled two terms after Louise had arrived . . . Joan's lawlessness had cheered the docile younger child, new to imprisonment, with visions of a larger freedom, while Louise, to Joan's disorder, had brought a soothing possibility of order, at least of the permanence of affection" 

By page 4 we learn that Louise's broken heart over the loss of Teddy is not apparent in her face:

"Louise's calm bland broad face bore no wrinkles, no evidence of grief or mental strife . . ."

And by page 11, Joan shows her annoyance at Louise's nun-like demeanor:

"You smooth things over and say things you don't mean . . . you are the most inhibited person I know . . . You've led an easy life; other people have made the decisions."

Louise's well-loved but bland character is evident even in her choice of clothing; she typically wears a light-brown day dress that won't draw attention to her.

The main conflicts and resolution in The Green Knight are with other characters, and though we see no change in Louise, her peacemaking sustains family and friends though their turbulent interactions.

A character who does finally show some waking up from this trance of complacency is Nathan Staples in A.L. Kennedy's novel Everything You Need. For most of the novel, though, he's not taking the one action he wants to take, with all kinds of excuses, including a soothing tactic at point Nine, minimizing any difficulty by comparing oneself to those who have it worse. The author Alison Louise Kennedy is also a stand-up comedian, and I laughed out loud at Nathan Staples' minimizing in the very first scene on page 1:

"But things could, most assuredly, be worse . . . The Persian Eye Cups, for example . . . Person, or persons unknown, but presumably Persian, might whip out a pair without warming and fit them on snug. They'd prise back my eyelids . . . then they'd buckle all the necessary straps . . . I would naturally scream and jabber while my eyeballs both subsided into froth and the acid gobbled up my optic nerve . . . Eventually, all I remember would gargle clear out of my ears in two repellent streams and that would be that  . . . Which would be worse--of course it would."

Poetry & Personality