The Enneagram for character development by Joanna Roddy

I have to confess, I put little stock in personality tests. They seem too generic, like magazine horoscopes that, with a little finagling, could apply to anyone. The tests are fun to take, but they're more like acceptable vanity exercises. Only the saints and psychologists among us really dig into understanding types other than their own. At best we say: "Oh you're an INFJ? I'm an ENFJ!" and remark on our shared traits and the differences between introverts and extroverts. 

But recently a psychologist friend introduced me to a personality system she uses in her practice, and I have found it incredibly helpful, both personally and in my relationships. Recently I decided to use it in my writing as well. I was having a hard time making certain characters distinct and clear. Using this system, two-dimensional characters suddenly popped up off the page. I began to understand what motivated them, how they would react in situations, what they might say (or not say), what vice they might gravitate toward, and what core virtue would emerge under the right circumstances. In short, it was character development magic. 

The Enneagram:

The personality typing system is called the Enneagram, and it articulates nine personality types that are interrelated. In an extremely condensed form, here are the nine types and their core motivations:

Type 1: The Reformer/ Perfectionist. "I must be/ do right."

Type 2: The Helper/ Giver. "I must help others."

Type 3: The Achiever/ Motivator/ Performer. "I must succeed."

Type 4: The Individualist/ Artist/ Romantic. "I must be unique."

Type 5: The Observer/ Investigator/ Thinker. "I must understand the world around me."

Type 6: The Loyalist/ Skeptic. "I must be secure."

Type 7: The Enthusiast/ Adventurer. "I must seek new experiences."

Type 8: The Challenger/ Leader. "I must be in control."

Type 9: The Peacemaker/ Mediator. "I must have/make peace."

Each personality type perceives these motivations as the means for them to be safe, to have meaning in their lives, or to be loved.

There are a lot more details to each type, like key fears and desires, and basic virtues and vices. Check out this cheat sheet from Wikipedia (click to enlarge):

Integration/ Disintegration:

What I like about the Enneagram is its nuance and complexity. We all know that a healthy or growing person and an unhealthy or stressed person behave in totally different ways, even if they share personality traits. The Enneagram predicts what traits emerge under stress and during personal growth.  Every Enneagram type uniquely integrates to the healthiest characteristics of another type and disintegrates to the least healthy behaviors of a different type.

For example, threes integrate to a six and disintegrate to a nine. Achieving threes can be self-focused, but with maturity, they look more like other-focused healthy sixes. Threes can be driven, but under stress they begin to look like unhealthy nines: disengaged and apathetic.

Wings:

Enneagram types can have an even greater degree of complexity by demonstrating traits from one of the numbers adjacent to them, which are called wings. The wing augments the primary personality. So you can have an observant five with an artistic four wing, which might produce a professorial art school type, or an achieving three with a helpful two wing might be an front-person for a non-profit organization. These are gross generalizations, but I find the flexibility of wings accounts for a wide array of personality manifestations, even among people who share a primary type. It keeps it all from becoming too canned and stereotyped, but not so general as to become meaningless. 

In Writing:

The Enneagram goes much farther and deeper than this crash course, and those who are interested could spend a lot of time learning about it. I think most of us instinctively pick up on others' personalities, especially writerly types who want to write believable characters. If people were clocks, we immediately perceive the difference between a cuckoo clock, a grandfather clock, a digital clock and an alarm clock. We get, on a basic level, what makes them tick. The Enneagram, then, is effectively like a screwdriver that removes the backing so we can see the actual mechanics at work. 

The most helpful aspect of the Enneagram for me is the basic fears and desires. It helps me to know how a character is going to react to the sticky situations I put them in. For example, one of my characters is an adventurous seven. When his parents want him to go into the military for a war he doesn't agree with, his response is to hop a plane out of the country. A seven's core fear is being trapped or in pain and their spontaneity can make them impulsive, so this response makes sense for him, drastic though it may seem. Another of my characters is a loyal six. A six's basic fear is making the wrong decision. They need guidance to orient themselves. In this situation, my six character would have struggled with living up to his parents' expectations. In fear of making the wrong decision for himself, he probably would have enlisted despite his own reservations. And that would have made for an entirely different plot.

A Warning: 

Fully fledged characters will still surprise us. They should never act against their own character, but they might step out of the box that a personality type wants to put them in. A challenger-leader eight who tends toward domineering might unexpectedly resist the urge to step into an argument, which would mean something substantial for that character. Perhaps they are moving in their direction of integration to look like a helping two, or they've newly realized that winning a fight is less effective than leading by example. This flexibility is how we avoid stereotypes and wooden characters. I like that the Enneagram allows for the changes brought on by maturing or devolving or blending a couple of personality types together. But once these type of tools have helped you build your writing, like scaffolding, they should fall away and let the real, living world on the page play itself out as it must. Using the Enneagram as a tool, not as a law, is the best way. 

Resources:

Start with the Enneagram Institute site and the Enneagram of Personality Wikipedia page. From there, there are lots of books, sites, and articles available to learn more about the Enneagram. And here's a link the the long version of the test if you want to find out what Enneagram type you are and to a shorter version and another type of short test. The last one is my favorite. I apologize in advance for the productive time you will inevitably lose on those tests, but if it gets you to an understanding of good character building, then I think you don't have to feel too guilty about it. 

Please leave a comment if you've used the Enneagram or other personality typing for character building! I'd love to hear your insights. And here's something I'm deeply curious to know: do the main characters you write have the same personality type as you do? Happy writing!

ON BEHALF OF LATE BLOOMERS by Mary E. Cronin

As the newest member of the Project Mayhem team, I confess I have a soft spot for late bloomers. I was a late bloomer myself (I may still qualify for the term, as I entered an MFA program at age 48!), and I love late-blooming characters. How do I define late bloomers? Late bloomers are not champing at the bit, pushing the envelope, or trying to act older than they are. They are content to act their age (and may even act a bit younger), and they are not in a rush to get to the next developmental stage.

Here are some great examples of late bloomers in recent middle-grade fiction:

• ·      In Kwame Alexander’s award winning verse novel The Crossover (2015 Newbery Medal winner and Coretta Scott King Honor book), twin brothers Joshua and Jordan Bell are excellent basketball players. Josh feels forsaken as his twin embarks on a first romance, and he frets as the family feels the stress of his father’s deteriorating health. Josh’s feeling of being left behind is captured beautifully in “Second-Person”— “After practice, you walk home alone./This feels strange to you, because/as long as you can remember/there has always been a second person.”

• ·      In Rebecca Stead’s Goodbye Stranger, seventh-grader Bridge is a fragile yet resilient character who suffered life-threatening injuries in an accident when she was younger and was out of school for almost a year due to her recuperation. This figures into her late-bloomer status as she missed out on some milestones in schooling. She dons her cat ear headband in the very beginning of the book: “…the ears became a comforting presence. When she was small, her father would sometimes rest his hand on her head as they went down the street. It was a little bit like that.” Bridge struggles with the social pressures of middle school that test the bonds of friendship with her two best friends, and she has some approach/avoidance feelings about a friendship with a boy that might turn into something more.

• ·      In Tim Federle’s Better Nate Than Ever, 13-year-old Nate, an aspiring actor with a love of show tunes, often gets teased for being gay. Yet he declares, “My sexuality, by the way, is off-topic and unrelated. I am undecided. I am a freshman at the College of Sexuality and I have undecided by major, and frankly I don’t want to declare anything other than ‘Hey jerks, I’m thirteen, leave me alone. Macaroni and cheese is still my favorite food—how would I know who I want to hook up with?’” Nate is firmly staking out his claim that he is not yet ready to deal with sexuality and courtship…which may shift a bit by the end of the story.

As adults who write for and about middle-graders, there is much to consider and respect in the unfolding process of a late bloomer’s development—social, emotional, and physical. By capturing the micro-steps of that unfolding, we can create rich and textured characters that go beyond the popular cliché of the snarky or wisecracking middle-grader who is in a rush to grow up.

There are rich possibilities for conflict in creating a late blooming character:

·      **The awkwardness sparked by delayed puberty, when peers are physically changing and your character is not. (Bridge in Goodbye Stranger is a great example of this.)

**Peers are beginning to pursue courtship, while late bloomers may have ambivalence about this. (The Crossover, Goodbye Stranger, Better Nate Than Ever)

**Late bloomers may resist scripted social situations like dances, Valentines Day, group chats.

**Many late bloomers feel mystified and/or lonely when siblings/friends begin interacting socially in more complicated ways (romantic or otherwise)  (The Crossover and Goodbye Stranger). There can be loss of friendship or feelings of closeness with peers when developmental paths are diverging.

**Late bloomers may not be yet venturing into snarkiness or boundary-testing; they may gravitate more towards home, safety, and rules as their peers are beginning to chafe against those things. (The Crossover and Goodbye Stranger) Late bloomers tend to be rule followers—rich territory for conflict.

**The primacy of family is important to late bloomers and provides an anchor, even as peer influences become more important to most middle-graders. (Josh’s loyalty to his parents in The Crossover is a good example)

**Late bloomers may have a rich inner life/observer status, but they may not always be able to comprehend or analyze what they are seeing; in some cases the reader may know more than the character does.  (Goodbye Stranger, The Crossover, Better Nate Than Ever)

 **Late bloomers may still crave “play” while peers are moving on to other ways of forming social relationships. (wearing the cat ears, the role of basketball, drawing doodles on school work) They may gravitate toward others late bloomers or younger siblings/friends, which can be a comfort or a source of awkwardness.

**The analytical skills of late bloomers are still developing, which might show itself in academic work, social relationships, or problem solving. (Better Nate Than Ever, The Crossover, Goodbye Stranger)

In our hurried world, I believe it’s important to capture the experience of the late-blooming kid in all its micro-steps. This profile transcends race, culture and socio-economics. Many of our avid middle-grade readers fit this description, and writing a nuanced portrayal of their experience will offer a rewarding mirror to them.  Even if our characters are ambivalent about some of the milestones of growing up, there are rich possibilities for complexity and conflict in their meandering yet inexorable path to maturity.

Do you have a favorite example of a late-blooming character in middle-grade fiction? Add it to the comments!

The Fun of World-Building

I'm just starting out on a new writing project and remembering how delightful it is to dream up an otherworld.  Fantasy authors get the added fun of making everything up.  Food?  Animals?  Setting?  Economy?  All of it must be created and pieced together in a somewhat logical puzzle.  This is tricky, because there's always so much more than will ever make it to the book.  I've spent many writing hours on badly done sketches and maps that will never see the light of day, but I don't think of any of them as wasted.  As any book-loving author knows, the deepest way to enter a story is to write one.

I've been living, writing, and revising in the Land of Story for the past five years, and I love that world, I really do.  But this new world?  Can I just tell you how much I love it, too?  I'm at the stage now where there are an overload of ideas, and I'm struggling with how to sort everything into some semblance of order.  For now, this is my process:

Stage 1: I start with the scribbled spiral notebook pages that testify I grew up in the '80s when even if you had a PC you didn't use it except for your computer "homework".  (Yes, indeed, that was my one and only venture into programming).

Stage 2: These notes translate to scattered post-its categorized by "Plot", "Setting", and "Character".  Mostly, these are vague ideas: dormitories are in a tree, or something like that.

Stage 3: The final stage takes a better shape, where things are color-coded (hooray for an excuse to linger in the office-supply aisles!), each character has specific goals, plot points are solidified, and setting is developed.  This is the closest I ever get to an outline, and typically all these pieces make it into the story, even if they're rearranged quite a bit by the end.

Right now, I'm at Stage 2, where things are taking shape but still are a bit of a mess.  The nice thing is, that this hangs on my bedroom wall, so in those groggy waking-up moments when inspiration hits, I can dash out a sticky note before it's too late.

What about you?  How do you organize your world-building?  Do you have any tips on capturing inspiration?  Or possibly you have a fabulous office supply you just can't live without?  Do share!