Using the Enneagram in Writing
Personality Systems
If you haven’t heard of the Enneagram, you may have heard of Myers-Briggs, or the Big Five, or the one with sixteen personalities, or the one with four animals, or Hogwarts Houses, or…you get it, there are a lot. You may have encountered them at work, or at school, or at some weeklong program at some point in your life. Basically, the idea is that you can classify a person’s personality with tests and evaluations. Do any of them work? Well, the answer seems to fall somewhere in the realm of “no, but also yes.”
As far as I can tell, there’s no good research to back up the personality tests, leaving them in the realm of pseudo-science. But the general impression I see is that these kinds of tests and typologies can approximate how real people behave and react to situations, and I’ve seen firsthand examples of improved communication from these kinds of personality systems. Basically, these systems can give people tools to understand aspects of themselves and others a bit better, even if they’re not as all-encompassing as advertised.
So, how does that help us in writing?
Many of these personality systems offer a fully developed template of character traits. In essence, they can serve as character generators or character refiners. They can tell you what your character is afraid of, what they most desire, what makes them uncomfortable, how they respond to various situations, how they interact with others, and so much more. These systems are gold mines of information that you can apply to your characters. And because we’re writing fiction, it doesn’t matter if these systems work in real life. The creators of these systems have tried very hard to describe real life with them, and so they have provided writers with guidelines for consistent traits and behaviors.
The Enneagram
The system I chose to use for my writing is the Enneagram. Part of that choice was happenstance: my wife’s company at the time was using it, and she connected with it very well, to the point where she can identify a person’s Enneagram type after talking to them for a few minutes. It’s scary impressive. The Enneagram also provides a bit more flexibility than some other systems, and I found it easier to integrate into my process.
The Enneagram is best shown as a circular diagram, and I’ve produced my own version of it below. There are nine personality types, largely based on core/basic desires/motivations and fears.
So wait, why are there arrows? And why is it in a circle like that, instead of a list? Those represent the two unique aspects of this system. The arrows represent a kind of personality “shift” under stress (the person is retreating/seeking safety under pressure) or growth (things are going well, and the person is moving forward). And the circle shows each type’s “wings.” Each personality type can have aspects of one or both of its neighbors (or neither). This is where the flexibility comes in, allowing you to tweak your character into ways that feel right.
Why Use the Enneagram?
The Enneagram does require a bit more digging and manipulation to figure things out. So why use it instead of something like Myers-Briggs, where the traits are literally right there in the letter designations? Well, truth be told, I used Myers-Briggs too, as well as Love Languages, but we’ll get to that. Here are things about the Enneagram that make it a good choice as your main tool:
Each personality type has a title that makes it easy to readily identify at a high level, and you can go back to that as an anchor at any time (i.e. my character just entered a room where people are stressed and frightened, and some are injured, what will they do? If your character’s a Type 2 (The Helper), they might jump right in and tend to the injured, while a Type 8 (The Challenger) might start shouting out orders right away to get things organized, while a Type 4 (The Individualist/Romantic) might freeze up).
Each type comes with core motivations and fears; this can make it dead simple to determine how your character responds to situations, and helps you, as the author, to maximize the impact of the story by prodding your character’s deepest fears and leading them towards their deepest desires.
As mentioned before, the “wings” on each type help you refine your characters by giving them some additional traits.