Alice wrote:
Ages ago on your blog you said you use enneagrams for your characters. I can’t find the posts but now I’ve read some of your books — Featured Attraction, Delicious, Married in a Rush, Being a Bad Girl, Driving him Wild (and enjoyed them)I’d love to know which ennegram types your characters were in each book.
Thank you for asking! I love talking about stuff like this. I’m sorry it’s taken a little while to post it.
Usually what I do, Alice, is to make up my characters, and then after I’ve spent some time developing them, I do the enneagram personality quiz (which is available online here, along with descriptions of the personality types), and then I develop the characters further from the help I get from the personality description. In the book I have, The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Riso and Hudson, it tells you what the types’ fatal flaws are likely to be, so that helps me ramp up conflict, too.
I didn’t do this for Featured Attraction, so I’m not 100% sure which type Kitty would be (probably a messed-up 3), but Jack is very definitely a type 7, The Enthusiast: a charming philanderer, who doesn’t know the meaning of “commitment”.
Marianne in Being a Bad Girl is a type 3, The Achiever: she defines herself by what she does, rather than who she is, and is driven to be the best at everything, even a bad girl. Oz is a bit of a mixture, of types 1, 2, and 5: an upright, honest man (1, the Reformer) who is caring towards others (2, the Helper) and tends to intellectualise his emotions (5, the Investigator).
In Delicious, Elisabeth the teacher who’ll do anything for her students is a 2, the Helper, and Angus the celebrity chef is one of the major alpha types, 8, the Challenger.
In Married in a Rush, Jo (like Jack in FA) is a type 7, the Enthusiast–she’s out for fun, and when she starts caring too much, she tries to distract herself. Bruno is a type 8, the Challenger, out for adventure, though as he’s been very hurt by his brother’s death he’s retreated into himself at the beginning.
I do tend to use type 8s for heroes as they’re very alpha–strong, sometimes domineering, brave, adventurous–but my heroine Zoe in Driving Him Wild was my female alpha, a definite 8. Nick, the hero, was the other alpha type, type 1, the Reformer: principled, loyal, and angry.
What’s interesting to me is that you can use the same type for two different characters and they can be very different. My 8s, Angus and Zoe, are an obvious example: he’s a celebrity chef and she’s a taxi driver, but they both take charge and assert themselves, for different reasons. I’ve done two type 3 heroines, Marianne from Being a Bad Girl and Jane from All Work and No Play… While Marianne achieved to try to please others, putting her own needs last and eventually becoming anorexic, Jane is a workaholic who believes she’s worth nothing except for how she performs in her job. Both of them feel they need to earn love, but in different ways: Marianne by being good at everything, and Jane by avoiding the emotional side of life where she thinks she is a failure.
I’ve only done one type 4 (Individualist)–Eleanor, in One Night Stand–and never a full type 9 (Peacemaker) or type 6 (Loyalist). They don’t seem to appeal to me so much–a little bit wimpy in my opinion. But maybe one day I’ll try them and see their strengths.
(I, myself, turn out to be a mix of types 7, 3, and 2–an Enthusiast who’s also an Achiever and a Nurturer. So it’s not surprising I’ve done quite a few 3s and 7s, and my heroine Rosie in Spirit Willing is exactly that mixture. Know thyself…)
*coughs* I knew we got on for a reason I am a mix of 7,3 and 2… ho hum.
Thanks Julie!
Not surprised, Biddy.
You’re welcome MB!
Very interesting Julie.
Tyoe 6 the loyalist becomes very intriguing when you realise that it is also what defines a *bad boy* — someone who breaks all the rules. It is a hard variant to get right, but it is the best fit for someone who has rebelled. A rake for example.
Tullio in ANC was a 6. The good soldier. And Valens in GH was a 6, but he had to learnt which rules were important to keep.
I will agree that 9 the peacemaker has little appeal for me, but possibly because I have not figured out the dynamics of the thing.
2,3 and 7 sound like very good variaotions to me as well…
My Hugh in One Night Stand is a bit of a 9, though not totally. And I never thought about bad boy sixes. Hmm.
Julie and friends – would value your opinions on how your characters can avoid sharing the authors’ own values and traits. Should they share them? Rosy Thornton brought his up on my blog. Is it a problem? Or inevitable that, given you have to love your H/h, they must be people you empathise with strongly and therefore, share some of your own fundamental values.
Thanks for such an interesting post. Such a great way to build the characters.
PS: I just bought ‘Spirit Willing,Flesh Weak’ this morning!
Sally x
This was a fabulous post, Julie, and thanks to Alice for asking the question that led to it! Having read all your books (except FA, which I’m still trying to track down on eBay, and AWANP, which is part of my TBR pile), it was very interesting to find out more about the types for the characters. I always worry that my characters aren’t solid enough when I start writing so I might look into using enneagrams myself.
Jess x
Phillipa, I have no trouble with my characters being similar to myself–nor with them not being obviously similar. I try to identify with everyone I write (even the villains) but some characters really are close to how I feel myself, and for some I have to make more of an imaginative leap. I don’t really think about it consciously, though sometimes the characters do things that I never would do and it surprises me.
Why would it be a problem if your characters share some of your traits? If you always wrote the same character (ie yourself) that could be a problem, but I don’t see anything wrong with letting fictional people display a little bit of you. At the same time, it’s good to be imaginative and challenge yourself to get into someone else’s shoes.
What do you think?
Sally, I hope you enjoy Spirit Willing! I see on your blog that Phillipa was the one to get you started on LBD books…hooray!
Jess, I sort of wondered if anybody would understand what I was going on about when I posted, so I’m glad you did. Enneagrams, in my opinion, are useful to get your own thoughts started, rather than as something to slavishly follow.
Julie – Thanks for the reply. I don’t have a problem with it at all as I think you can’t help identifying with main characters. Rosy Thornton was asking about it on my blog. We were talking about voice and the question arose of of how authors’ own traits become merged with your character’s personality.
Thanks for that, Julie. I never thought of combining the enneagram types. Is there anything in the enneagram books about combining types or do you just add whatever traits you feel your character needs?
Phillipa, yes, I read your very interesting blog and am still thinking about how to reply! I guess I’ve missed the boat on that one though.
Alice, I think the book does talk about mixing types together. I’ve tended to have mixed types when I’ve thought up the character totally, they are utterly real to me, and then found that no one type fits everything. More like real life I guess.
Interesting stuff, Julie. I did these for myself and for a couple of my characters I know really well, and it absolutely nailed them (and me!). Interestingly, one of the characters I’m writing is a bit of a chameleon, wild mood swings, and I thought he’d be a mixture but he came out as a 7.
A fine tool for procrastination. I mean research! Ahem.
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That is so useful! I’ve just checked out my characters and found at other conflicts between them that are going to be great! Thanks Julie!