Not everyone’s dark night of the soul is the same—use the Enneagram to make sure your plot is right for your character.
(Note: I’m using the pronoun “they” in this text for convenience, despite what Mrs. Kater taught me in the 4th grade.)
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a system that lays out the fears and desires of nine basic types and how they react to stress and integration. Within each Enneagram type are additional categorizations, such as whether a person wings to their internalized or externalized neighbor.
There are subtypes to say whether they are social (group of people-oriented), sexual (intense particular relationships), or self-preservation. It’s a gloriously never-ending rabbit hole.
Like the Myers-Briggs, a person’s enneagram type is found through observation and interactions with the individual, not an independent feature such as their star sign. The mystical symbol (the nine-sided star shape) likely dates back to antiquity, but there is little doubt that Claudio Naranjo and Oscar Ichazo popularized the personality typology in the West in the mid-20th century.
Enneagram types have It has been used extensively in Jungian psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy, and the Catholic church, among other systems and institutions.
They are more useful to a writer than many other systems because, once you have your type, it’s highly predictive.
Determining which Enneagram type you are is a slow process of familiarity, not something that can be determined in a quick online quiz. However, you can quickly dictate the Enneagram type of your novel’s characters.
For a writer, it’s a goldmine for bouncing personality types against each other, finding story goals and pinch points, and setting up the ideal situations to trigger our characters’ breaking out of (or succumbing to) their habits.
Writing Symbiotic Plots Using the Enneagram
As a reader and writer, I want my stories to feel like they couldn’t have been written for any other character than the ones I’m reading about. There is something exquisite about the story where the two were made for each other.
While many stories seem organized to see how a particular character would respond to a specific problem, almost like a lab rat in a maze, other plots develop organically out of the character’s growth and stress arcs, and vice versa. The story could only happen to a very particular person.
The Enneagram can help writers build a symbiotic plot and character structure.
Enneagram Examples From Literature
What is a happy ending for each type, and what constitutes a setback? Let’s use Enneagram Seven and Lizzie Bennet in Pride & Prejudice as an example.
Lizzie grows and reaches a happy ending because she embraces her shadow side. This is a real make-or-break moment for an Enneagram Seven because Sevens notoriously run toward joy. They are haunted by the fleeting nature of life. They can go so far as to believe they don’t have a shadow side, instead asserting that other people are their shadows.
In this way, an unhealthy Seven can run towards joy and fun all their lives without ever looking behind themselves to say, “That darkness that I said was someone else all this time? It was me.” Lizzie made Darcy her shadow until she turned around and owned it for herself.
Plot From the Enneagram
But what if we construct our plot from scratch rather than analyzing existing literature? I’ll use a female Enneagram Three, wing Four, to show how their tailor-made plot arc might look.
Many successful people are Threes, especially indie authors. Some people mentioned as Threes are Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, The Rock, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Many high-achieving go-getters are mistyped as Threes, which says a lot about Threes themselves.
They are image-conscious, attractive to others, highly ambitious, and can be competitive workaholics. Every challenge is an opportunity for them. Threes are often held up as role models, particularly in American society.
Basic Fears: What do Threes fear above all? Not being recognized and valued, of having no worth.
Basic Desires: What do they want above all? They want to feel recognized and valued, to feel they have worth.
You may have noticed from that description that Threes have the potential to make others feel bad about themselves, unseen, unheard, and underperforming. Hello, conflict!
The following is a potential goal for any story with a happy ending and a positive story arc. The main characters start out in an average unhealthy state, start to see possibilities for moving towards integration and growth, are provoked into an even more unhealthy state than they started with, and finally move to a healthier state than at the beginning.
Beginning Problem State: Something made the high-achieving Enneagram Three, who believes they always need to perform and excel in order to get love, feel worthless. They seem not to feel their feelings or listen to anyone else’s feelings. Others may think they are vain and shallow. They lose touch with intimacy and their own emotions. They become too much of a package, too contrived.
Midpoint state: Something is making the Three feel Valuable and Worthwhile. They have others to think of. They want to become “the best me I can be” on a human level and endorse positive relational attributes.
Dark Night of the Soul before the climax: Something made the Enneagram Three feel really worthless. Take your Type Three here only if you’re in it for the real melodrama. Here, the Three wants to show others how superior they are, even if it’s a facade. They seem (and can become) narcissistic about their self-worth and talents. They become arrogant and contemptuous of others’ success. This is a real low for them. Only some “you are worth it just the way you are; you have the power within you” medicine can save the Three now.
Climax and Resolution: The Three chooses to become committed to others and cooperative. They regain their energy and intrinsic sense of their own value outside of achievements, and become full of grace.
How to Write a Central Conflict Using the Enneagram
So, what kind of stressors might a Three encounter? Not winning, for one!
Failure is a major stressor for Enneagram Type Three.
Maybe they have all their tasks taken from them and are forced to relax someplace with no hope of competing. Maybe the definition of success was redefined entirely, and they have no skills in the new definition of success. For example, perhaps they are a terrible baker, but they have to win a baking competition to get their old job back – and they can never become a good baker (no sense of smell or taste, perhaps?)
Or maybe they are a social influencer who just got all their accounts banned, and now they are a nobody in a new country where they don’t speak the language? They have been overlooked for a deserved promotion again, with rumors that they will always be denied the role because of traits outside of their control (sexuality, race, gender, parentage), and there is no other business in town for them to try?
The area of growth of Type Three can build a really fuzzy, feel-good story. They become the characters who learn to value themselves even when they can’t perform, think about the needs and feelings of others, and be loyal to causes and people beyond themselves. Again, especially for American readers, that is a healing message.
What plots can you build out of just that one type? A million, right?
Now, add another Enneagram type, and you will have complexity galore.