Enneagram: Creating Characters

By Scott Rhoades

(Note: Because of a very hectic work schedule this week, I'm reprinting a blog post I write in January 2008 on my own blog, edited somewhat for today's post.)

Last time, I wrote about how to make your villains more realistic and likeable. If you read that, you might remember that I wrote about the difference between a hero and villain being largely the point of view, that the hero is the bad guy from the antagonist's point of view. And the antagonist might actually be right.

Today I'm going to continue down that path by showing a way to use personality tests to establish character types for the people in your stories. Different character types naturally conflict, and this creates the tension you need for the clash between a protagonist and antagonist.

I'll start out by revealing that I am not a fan of those quizzes in magazines or on Web sites that claim to be able to fit you into some narrow category that defines who you are. They can be interesting, and sometimes they come frighteningly close to my image of myself, but, in general, anything that takes real people and shoves them into tight little cubbies isn’t to be trusted. People are too complicated for that.

When you try to create fictional characters, however, these things can be a tremendous help. They can help you determine your characters’ desires and how they will act in the various situations they’ll face. This is important because, for a character to seem real, he or she has to react to situations in a way that is, if not predictable, at least can be predicted by his or her personality. A character who reacts to everything emotionally isn’t likely to sit around navel gazing, reasoning out the solutions to the difficulties faced along the arc of the story.

There are many systems that purport to categorize personalities. My favorite for character generation, though, is the Enneagram.

In geometry, an enneagram is a regular, nine-sided star figure. The personality Enneagram categorizes personalities into nine types:

Type 1: The Reformer. The rational, idealistic type.
Type 2: The Helper. The caring, nurturing type.
Type 3: The Motivator. The adaptable, success-oriented type.
Type 4: The Artist. The intuitive, reserved type.
Type 5: The Thinker. The perceptive, cerebral type.
Type 6: The Skeptic. The committed, security-oriented type.
Type 7: The Generalist. The enthusiastic, productive type.
Type 8: The Leader. The powerful, aggressive type.
Type 9: The Peacemaker. The easygoing, accommodating type.

What I like about this system is that it doesn’t say a person is one type and that’s it. It assigns you a number value that shows how firmly you fit into each type. In other words, it acknowledges a leader might be a peacemaker as well as a reformer, with strong generalist tendencies. It also defines which types bring either comfort or stress to each type. So, for example, a two is stressed by an eight, but finds comfort in a four. This tells you that, if your protagonist is a Helper, her sidekick could be an Artist, and the antagonist is most likely a Leader.

You could divide your characters into these types and stop there, but I’d recommend doing an Enneagram quiz for, at least, your main characters. It might seem overly analytical, but the act of taking the quiz forces you to think about your character’s personality in a way you might not be used to. In other words, the quiz itself, regardless of the results, helps you define your character.

I once did one of these online quizzes for a character I was working on. It involves 37 questions, with two possible answers for each. If you take this quiz, I suggest printing the page before you click to calculate the results. Then you can go back and look at how you answered the questions. Make the quiz itself part of your character profile.And, of course, you should spend some time before hand thinking about your character so you're not just making stuff up as you answer the questions.

I got these results for my character:

Type 1	Type 2	Type 3	Type 4	Type 5	Type 6	Type 7	Type 8	Type 9
2	8	3	5	2	6	4	3	3

These results tell me that she is primarily a Helper, with strong Skeptical tendencies. She is not a Reformer or a Thinker. So what could I do with this character? Well, since a Helper is stressed by a Leader, she obviously needs to be pitted against a Leader. And maybe she has to be put into a situation where she needs to be a Thinker. Like, maybe she needs to plot revenge against the Leader. As it turns out, this is a major part of the story I’ve come up with, so the test tells me I’m on the right track.

Why does the test tell me that? Well, if she is clearly not a Thinker, then having to become one means that there will be conflict, not only against her Leader enemy, but also internal conflict with herself as she struggles to act in a way that it unnatural for her. She’ll revert to her natural personality, which will work against what she has to do. She’ll have to struggle constantly to achieve her goal because she’s fighting against her own nature.

By taking this one quiz, I discovered both internal and external adversaries for my character. That’s what stories are made of. So I can stop now and start writing, right? No. As Sol Stein says, each character in a fictional work needs to have his own script. So, if I take the same quiz for each of the major characters in my story, I’ll get a good idea of their own inner and outer conflicts, and how they’ll each react to various situations. By keeping this information in mind, I’ll create characters with their own consistent lives, and I’ll see why conflicts arise, even between my main character and her best friend who is supposed to help her but actually causes additional stress.

The Enneagram is a complicated system, and I don’t pretend to be an expert. If you want to know more, I suggest starting with the Wikipedia article and going from there. For an even deeper examination, I recommend 9types.com, where you can learn quite a bit about the system and find additional tests. For your first test, answer for yourself so you can get an idea of the questions and how the test and the Enneagram works. Then, think about your characters and take the test for each of them.

Whether you end up following the Enneagram system to build your characters or not, just thinking about them and taking this kind of test is going to help you flesh out realistic characters.

Your story will be better for it.

Scott Rhoades is an Orem-based writer who is scheduled to contribute to this blog on the first and third Friday of each month. For contact information, including his Twitter and Facebook details, see http://www.scottrhoades.com/contact/contact.html.

Writing a Good Villain

by Scott Rhoades

One of the most common bits of advice writers receive is that we have to give the villain positive traits if we want the villain to be realistic. Likewise, our protagonists should have flaws. One of the reasons why we're told this so often is that it always stops there. Seems like nobody ever explains how that advice works or what it really means.

This is my attempt to fill the gap. And I'll do it by stepping into forbidden territory.

Politics.

Don't run away. I think it's a way to give an example that just about everybody gets, and I'm going to be as non-partisan as possible.

There's a certain Utah politician who, to me, is the epitome of evil. My guess is that many of you have a politician you look at that way, maybe even one I support. That's why the example works.

This particular politician expresses, very clearly, views that are opposed to my own. His mouth is always getting him into trouble, and for good reason. If I were the protagonist in a political novel told from my point of view, he would be the antagonist, and would be portrayed as the horrid person I believe he is. My character would fight against him, with the objective to not only stop his reelection, but probably to discredit him in the process. To me, he's evil.

If you've drawn a realistic villain and a realistic hero, then chances are that the line between good and bad are completely a matter of point of view. And that's where it gets fun.

This particular politician is not a comic book villain who is evil for the sake of being evil. By all accounts, he is adored by his family. His neighbors like and respect him. His dog probably gets excited when he comes home from work, or even from a ten minute jaunt to the store. For all I know, he might be one of those rare people who is loved unconditionally by a cat. His supporters vote for him because they think he's right with a capital R. He is motivated by his sense of right and wrong--taking a stance that he sees as defending right. He probably got into politics as a means to exercise his ideals and protect those of his community.

Sounds more like a hero, right? In fact, although I'm the protagonist in my own story, if it were told from his point of view, I'd be the villain. I criticize him, oppose his ideals, want to thwart his goals, and I would love to see him lose in a big way. But I'm adored by my family, I think. I'm motivated by my own ideals, my own sense of right and wrong. Heck, I'm even loved, somehow, by a cat who annoys me.

So the good guy and the bad guy depend totally on the point of view from which the story is told. Flip the point of view (or, as super-editor Sol Stein suggests, give each character his own script), and the protagonist and antagonist are also flipped. Each character is, from his own point of view, good, and is opposed by the other.

Here's another example, one that could be used in a story for young children who might not quite understand the previous example.

Little Molly has a new puppy. This puppy is so naughty. It always tries to get outside. It's uncontrollable when she takes it for walks, pulling at the leash and trying to go its own way. It doesn't follow any of Molly's perfectly reasonable rules. When the puppy runs away and is missing for a whole day, Molly is devastated. How could her puppy be so wicked?

But what is the puppy doing, really? It's being true to its own puppiness. It doesn't understand Molly's unnatural rules. All she does is try to to restrain it and she scolds it for simply being what it is. Maybe at the end of the story, the puppy learns to submit after getting itself into a dangerous situation. It learns that Molly was right.

Or, better, Molly starts school. She is restrained, forced to follow rules, when all she wants to do is go outside and play, like a typical kid. She learns to understand the puppy's point of view, and realizes that puppy is not really naughty. It's just like her. Because of this puppy, she understands herself and her world just a little better. She learns something about her own puppiness.

So how do you show this in your own stories?

The key is to look at the story from your villain's point of view, not just the hero's. Why does the villain do what he does? How is the "good guy" an obstacle to the bad guy? Give the villain good intentions that are thwarted by the protagonist. Show your villain being loved by family, a pet, a crippled neighbor child. Show him rescuing a scraggly animal from the shelter, one that would almost certainly not be adopted and so faces a terrible fate.

Create at least one scene where the protagonist lights into the antagonist in a way that makes the protagonist less sympathetic than the antagonist, a scene where the roles of good guy and bad guy are flipped, even though it's still told from the protagonist's point of view. I bet it will end up being one of your favorite scenes. Now take the energy from that scene and scatter it strategically throughout the story.

If the reader can sympathize with your villain, which might sometimes mean that the hero appears to be wrong, then she'll care about both of these characters and be sucked into the story. Maybe she'll want the hero to win, but she won't really want the villain to lose. This creates stress and conflict, not just in the story but in the reader herself.

And that makes for a good story that won't soon be forgotten after the last page is turned.

Scott Rhoades is an Orem-based writer who is scheduled to contribute to this blog on the first and third Friday of each month. For contact information, including his Twitter and Facebook details, see http://www.scottrhoades.com/contact/contact.html.