What’s Your Character’s Number? What the Enneagram can reveal about your characters’ personalities

Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

Personality tests are all the rage in social media land, but few tests can be as accurate, revealing, and insightful as the Enneagram. An ancient concept that finds modern uses among psychologists, educators, and hiring managers, the Enneagram is a circle separated into nine interconnected numbers, with each number representing personality traits, inner drives, and strengths and weaknesses.

I thought it would be fun to see where the characters in my novel, The Power Club and its forthcoming sequel, The Secret Club (due to be published on Feb. 20) land on this circle, and below is what I came up with. 

First, a couple of caveats need mentioning.

Not every trait in a personality type will apply to everyone who fits that type. If you are a Seven (“The Enthusiast”), for example, you might find some traits that resemble you and others that don’t.

Also, it can be difficult to pin one’s own number down. I’ve taken several Enneagram tests in the last few months, and depending on their results and on the opinions of people who know me, I’m a One (“The Reformer,” also known as “The Perfectionist”), a Four (“The Individualist”), A Five (“The Investigator”) or a Nine (“The Peacemaker”).

However, in studying the Enneagram, I think I have come to understand myself a little better.

But in terms of revealing where your characters might land on the circle, the Ennegram can be both insightful and surprising, as my results on three of the Power Club characters show.

More information on the Enneagram can be found at the Enneagram Institute, from when come the quotes below. Two helpful books are also listed in the bibliography at the end of this post.

Herewith is how three of the main PC kids stack up:

Damon = Six (The Loyalist)

According to the Enneagram Institute, Sixes are “reliable, hard-working, responsible, and trusting.” They “foresee problems and foster cooperation.” We see this in the first book, as Damon is the one who rallies The Power Club into becoming heroes. They join in when he fights back against the mob that invades the mall, and they (or most of them) later help him foil a robbery. Of all the PC members, Damon is the most committed to becoming a hero and doing something positive with the powers they possess.

But Sixes also have a dark side (in Damon’s case, this is both literal and figurative). They can become “defensive, evasive, and anxious,” and also “reactive, defiant, and rebellious.” We see these traits play out when the District opposes Damon’s plans to turn the PC into heroes. Damon becomes convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the unseen leaders of the District are out to get him, lying about the limits of his darkness power and turning other kids against him.

Sixes “want to have security, to feel supported by others,” and this is why the Power Club is so important to Damon. He doesn’t want to become a solo hero, acting on his own. He wants to be part of a team, working with other powered kids to make a difference. When things don’t work out the way he plans, he can become “competitive and arrogant” (as we’ll see in the second book), but, at his best, Damon is “internally stable and self-reliant, courageously championing [himself] and others”—especially when their survival is at stake.

Denise = Five (The Investigator)

As a precognitive, Denise embodies a Five’s traits of being “visionary . . . ahead of [her] time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.” But her “Fiveness” goes beyond the nature of her power. She is “able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and independent skills.” In the False Alarm prequel, we saw that young Denise loved science and kept an ant farm. Her interest in science ties in with her key motivation of wanting to possess knowledge and understand the physical environment.

But the downside of her power and personality is that she can become “detached . . . high-strung and intense.” Her desire to control her world leads her to make decisions she later regrets. (We will see one such decision at the end The Power Club and some consequences of it in The Secret Club.) 

Typical of Fives, Denise is afraid of being useless; she knows her power isn’t very useful in battle, and, thus, she struggles with feeling insecure and isolated. At her best, she is “self-confident and decisive” and even the other PC members know when to listen to her.

Kyle = Three (The Achiever)

Kyle, who becomes Damon’s best friend, exudes the traits of a Three: “self-assured, attractive, and charming” as well as “ambitious, competent, and energetic.” As the oldest member of PC, Kyle is probably the best qualified to be its leader, but he’s not threatened when Damon is chosen instead. Rather, Kyle remains “diplomatic and poised,” a role model “who inspires others.”

Still, like other Threes, Kyle is status-conscious, and in his world, status often means doing the things other 15-year-old boys do: hunt, play football, and drive sports cars. In fact, Kyle is obsessed with a Mustang he helps his father rebuild, even though his own natural teleportation power can take him anywhere he wants to go. In his heart, Kyle wants both to fit in and “to be admired, and to impress others.” To him, this means acquiring the status symbols of achievement, such as the driver’s license he is looking forward to on his 16^th birthday.

At his best, Kyle becomes “cooperative and committed to others,” assisting Damon in foiling the robbery at great personal cost.

So, what do we learn from all this?

What’s most interesting to me is that the types align not only with each character’s personality but also with his or her powers. A security-conscious Damon, for example, would naturally see his darkspace as an environment in which to feel safe. Kyle, on the other hand, has an inverse relationship between his power and his personality. As a teleporter, he is conceivably one of the most powerful kids in the district, but all he wants to do is fit in.

In the next post, I’ll reveal the numbers of the other PC kids.

Meanwhile, you can use the Enneagram to see what you can learn about your own characters.

Bibliography

The Enneagram Institute. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/

Stabile, Suzanne. (2018). The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy Relationships. InterVarsity Press.

Palmer, Helen. (2010). The Enneagram in Love and Work: Understanding Your Intimate & Business Relationships. HarperOne.

One Writer’s Journey: Writing and the Intersection of Everything

            One of my college professors gave me a strange piece of advice: If I wanted to be a professional writer, he cautioned me, I should study something other than writing. His reasoning: Writers need something (other than writing) to write about, and too much focus on one thing can lead to a myopic view of the world.

            At the time, I thought such advice was mad. I wanted to write comic books for a living; why did I need to study anything else? However, I kept his words in the back of my mind even as I went on to devote most of my studies to writing—majoring in English, completing a master’s in English, attending numerous workshops and conferences.

In time, I began to understand what he meant: Writing can be an insular world. Writers spend all day inside their own heads. They hang out with other writers, talk about writing, and perpetuate the sense the writing is the center of our universe—almost our god.

***

            However, a singular focus on the craft of writing isn’t necessarily bad. When I was young, I watched adults around me struggle through jobs they hated. I decided I didn’t want that. I never wanted to take a job or choose a career just to earn a paycheck. Money alone has never been sufficient motivation for me to do anything (though lack of money has been). 
            I chose a different path by focusing on things which interested me, things I enjoyed doing, and things which challenged me intellectually and emotionally. I found all of these things in writing—and it happened almost by accident.

***

            I grew up reading comic books and watching science fiction shows such as Star Trek. They sparked my imagination by showing me possibilities that didn’t exist in the so-called real world. I wanted to be a super-hero or a Starfleet officer! Since those careers did not exist, I turned to the creative process behind such characters.

            Like most kids, I first wanted to be an artist. Armed with only a pencil, typing paper, and markers, I got pretty good at copying the line work, figures, and shading of certain comic book artists (Neal Adams, Dave Cockrum, and John and Sal Buscema were favorites) and created my own characters. But when it came to studying art in school, something didn’t click. Learning to draw fruit, the folds in clothing, and the same figure doing different things (smiling, dancing, running), was too much like work. I wanted to do something fun.

***

            Learning the craft of writing hasn’t been fun (at least as I defined the term then), but it has engaged me in wholly different ways. I love the structure of writing—how an outline can lead to the basic building blocks of a story yet leave room for improvisation. I love the way writing looks on a page or screen—neat and ordered formats remove all doubt as to where to put the page number and allow me to concentrate on the most important thing in writing: ideas.

I also became enthralled with writing scripts. I write something down, and a character in a story says it. I describe a scene, and an artist brings it to life.

Early collaborations, however, did not go well. As I wrote numerous scripts which will never be drawn, I became aware of my own limitations as writer. I created a Star Trek-like military, but had little clue what being in the military was actually like. (Fortunately, my brother and father both served, so I learned somewhat from their experiences.) I cleverly called my science officer a “geometeorologist,” but had no idea what a geologist or a meteorologist would do in the context of an alien planet, let alone someone who combined both fields.

Writing super-heroes seemed easier because I could just make stuff up, but even then I had no idea how to pace or end a story. I was further dismayed when people read my scripts and told me all my characters sounded alike!

Clearly, I was missing something.

One thing I've learned from my journey is that writing does indeed go hand in hand with other things--with everything, in fact. Garrison Keillor said it best and with his usual wit: "Nothing bad happens to writers. Everything is material." Everything. 

My professor was partially correct: If you want to write, study writing, but also study everything else: politics, religion, philosophy, human behavior, geology, biology, history...everything informs your world and the worlds you create.

Art credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/277036/ink-muse