by Jeff Kitchen
But Jake also exhibits some traits of a 1, The Reformer, at the end of Training Day:
Conscientious with strong personal convictions: They have an intense sense of right and wrong, personal religious and moral values. Wish to be rational, reasonable, self-disciplined, mature, moderate in all things. Extremely principled, always want to be fair, objective, and ethical: truth and justice primary values. Sense of responsibility, personal integrity, and of having a higher purpose often make them teachers and witnesses to the truth.
Jake refuses to yield to Alonzo’s perverse way of doing things, and attacks him to try to lock him away. His sense of justice and fairness is innate, and it informs his decision-making as a cop. It is this strength of character that pulls him through.
Because evaluating someone’s Enneagram type can be rather subjective, particularly for those of us who are not experts in the field, we will not analyze the characters from all the six movies studied in this book. The intention here is to expose you to this powerful resource, to give you a solid, working understanding of its function, and to show you how to build a character with it—which we will do next. For a comprehensive guide to the Enneagram in film, check out Thomas Condon’s book, The Enneagram Movie and Video Guide. It describes the Enneagram types for characters in hundreds of movies. For example, in Tootsie, Condon says that Dustin Hoffman (Michael) played an argumentative, hotheaded 6; Bill Murray (Jeff) and Jessica Lange (Julie), both 9ish; Dabney Coleman (Ron), a 3; and Teri Garr (Sandy) and Sydney Pollack (George), both 6s.
LET’S CREATE A CHARACTER WITH THE ENNEAGRAM
Let’s build a character who was born into extreme wealth, who because of her money is having a hard time finding love. People are either so awed by her wealth that they defer to her in a worshipful way, or they’re so desirous of it that they see only the gold. To complicate things, let’s say that she’s not very good with people anyway—she’s withdrawn and wrapped up in her own world, making it all the harder to find love. So she decides to dress up as a “regular person” in the hopes of learning how “normal” folks live and find love. Looking through the Enneagram list, we discover that a 4, The Individualist, has some characteristics that fit the bill. The overview of this personality style is:
The Sensitive, Withdrawn Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental. Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance. Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an identity). . . . On the “search for self.”
This all works exceptionally well for the character we’ve got in mind. The observation about the desire “to create an identity” is particularly stimulating. What kind of person needs to create an identity? Think of a schoolboy busy watching the kids around him and modeling himself on the coolest kids as if it were absolutely crucial to him. Many adults are still searching “to find themselves and their significance.”
The Enneagram also says this about Average 4s:
Heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination. . . .They interiorize everything, taking everything personally, but become self-absorbed and introverted, moody and hypersensitive, shy and self-conscious, unable to be spontaneous or to “get out of themselves.” Stay withdrawn to protect their self-image and to buy time to sort out feelings. . . .They become melancholy dreamers, disdainful, decadent, and sensual, living in a fantasy world. Self-pity and envy of others.
Focus on that first bit—they “heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination”—for a window into this potential character. We’re constructing her persona right now, and this is rich building material. She’s caught up in her fantasies, her passions, and her imagination—but how? What kind of fantasies? What are her dreams? It says in the description of 4s that they want to “attract a rescuer.” Does she dream of a Prince Charming?
The Enneagram also says above that 4s “become self-absorbed and introverted, moody and hypersensitive.” That’s a fascinating set of personality traits to work with. How would a writer show that? How does someone self-absorbed and hypersensitive navigate the world in disguise? All these questions and insights must be processed by your subconscious computer as you work on her disposition. Shyness would make it hard for her to meet people, but it can also be charming. And remember that she’s broken free from her insulated wealthy world to be a “regular Joe,” so she’s not all that shy—at least she is bashing on the door of her trap. It’s intriguing that 4s are described as “melancholy dreamers” and that they can be caught in “self-pity and envy of others.” More grist for our mill.
The 4’s Unhealthy aspect says:
When dreams fail, become self-inhibiting and angry at self, depressed and alienated from self and others, blocked and emotionally paralyzed. Ashamed of self, fatigued, and unable to function.
This brings up a darker side of the character’s personality, which suggests a more complex, troubled person. Anger, shame, paralysis, depression—these are emotions everybody can identify with. They make her more human, more vulnerable, more real. For even darker possibilities, refer to:
Despairing, feel hopeless and become self-destructive, possibly abusing alcohol or drugs to escape. In the extreme: emotional breakdown or suicide is likely. Generally corresponds to the Avoidant, Depressive, and Narcissistic personality disorders.
This offers a rather full portrait of someone in trouble and searching for love and a new self. The Key Motivations round out the portrait:
Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, to take care of emotional needs before attending to anything else, to attract a “rescuer.”
This is all great material with which to form this lonely but complicated person. However, to create a truly full-fledged character it is important to include the positive aspects of a 4. It’s too limited and boring to make this character completely flawed, plus she’ll need a platform from which to transform herself and find love (assuming this story isn’t a tragedy). So here are some of the useful Healthy aspects of a 4:
Sensitive and intuitive both to self and others: gentle, tactful, compassionate. Highly personal, individualistic, “true to self.” Self-revealing, emotionally honest, humane. Ironic view of self and life: can be serious and funny, vulnerable and emotionally strong. . . . Profoundly creative, expressing the personal and the universal, possibly in a work of art. Inspired, self-renewing and regenerating: able to transform all their experiences into something valuable: self-creative.
This is a nice collection of traits for who this character would be when she turned her life around.
Incorporating some traits of a 2, The Helper, can take us even further in developing her character. The 2’s Basic Fear is “of being unwanted, unworthy of being loved,” and their Basic Desire is “to feel loved.” They tend to “want to be closer to others, so start ‘people pleasing,’ becoming overly friendly . . . . Give seductive attention: approval, ‘strokes,’ flattery.” Surely we all know people like that and have been there ourselves, so it rings true and can be thrown into the mix. Experiment with adding characteristics of a 2 to bring in another whole dimension. Our goal is not to follow rigorously the study of the Enneagram, but to create a dynamic personality. Mix and match as needed, and you’ll find that the Enneagram is a remarkably rich resource.
Here’s more on the 2:
Become overly intimate and intrusive: They need to be needed, so they hover, meddle, and control in the name of love. Enveloping and possessive: the codependent, self-sacrificial person who cannot do enough for others.
Does this help paint the picture of a lonely person? Yes. Does this lonely person sabotage her own efforts by being enveloping and possessive? Certainly. The Enneagram’s scrutiny enhances the complexity of the character, multiplying the potential plot dynamics for this story.
Can be manipulative and self-serving, in
stilling guilt. . . . Extremely self-deceptive about their motives and how aggressive and/or selfish their behavior is. Domineering and coercive: feel entitled to get anything they want from others.
This is fascinating insight—it’s just how a person with a lot of money might use that sense of entitlement to manipulate someone into being her friend. She’s strengthening our characterization by unconsciously bringing traits from her wealthy upbringing into the mix. This reveals another part of her problem, another layer to who she is and what she has to overcome in order to find love.
Some of the Healthy traits of a 2 are:
Empathetic, compassionate, feeling for others. Caring and concerned about their needs. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, forgiving, and sincere. Encouraging and appreciative, able to see the good in others. Service is important, but takes care of self too: They are nurturing, generous, and giving—a truly loving person. . . . Become deeply unselfish, humble, and altruistic: giving unconditional love to self and others. Feel it is a privilege to be in the lives of others.
This fills in the portrait of someone who has really overcome her difficulties and learned how to have a real relationship by the end of the story. This description can also help generate a more complex characterization before her transformation, so that while she’s troubled, she’s much more than that, too—as any real person would be.
By exploring the nine types of the Enneagram with just a general idea of this character in mind, we’ve unearthed material that substantially enhances any writer’s natural process of creating and dimensionalizing a character. We combined the traits from two different personality styles and found unexpected depth, flaws, sympathetic aspects, and color. As we examined the specific traits from the Enneagram, we tried them on for fit and invented behavior for this character based on those traits. We played “What if?” with a powerful resource that offers a plentiful array of spot-on possibilities.
MORE INFORMATION ON THE ENNEAGRAM
To investigate other approaches to the Enneagram, seek out the many books on the subject with comprehensive chapters on each of the nine personality types. These books explore childhood patterns, the self-preservation instinct, the social and sexual instinct, and so much more. The Enneagram will help you dig deeply into human nature, offering a gold mine of material for in-depth character study. For further reference, check out The Wisdom of the Enneagram and Discovering Your Personality Type, by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, Helen Palmer’s The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others In Your Life, or Eli Jaxon-Bear’s The Enneagram of Liberation: From Fixation to Freedom. Most bookstores will have a section on the Enneagram.
START USING THE ENNEAGRAM IN YOUR OWN SCRIPT
1. Which of the nine personality types of the Enneagram resonate with each of your characters? Don’t feel as though you must pick one right away. Explore them all. Play with them. Use both positive and negative aspects of the type to expand upon your initial impression of the character.
2. Think about real people you know who fit certain Enneagram types and use that to get a handle on some of your characters’ attributes. If you know someone well and can see the underlying mechanics of their personality through the lens of the Enneagram, this can give you a lot of insight into developing a character with similar traits.
3. Do any of the types represent personality attributes you’d like your characters to have? Rather than merely identify them, you can actively mold characters to an Enneagram type. Assemble and build extraordinary characters from the wealth of traits, preferences, instincts, and tendencies at your disposal.
4. Use the nine personality types to make your characters different from one another. Give each of them a distinct voice. Heighten conflict by reinforcing character types that contrast. Make sure that your characters don’t just reflect your own personality.
5. Create flaws in your characters with the Average and Unhealthy aspects from their type. This makes them more human and recognizable, as well as giving them room to grow and change as the plot develops.
6. Does understanding the characters in your script open up new avenues in your plot? Knowing that a certain type of character tends to act in a certain way can suggest new scenes or plot twists.
7. Get a book on the Enneagram and study the character types in more depth. This will expose you to a comprehensive knowledge of your characters that will open many doors and answer many questions. The better you know your characters, the more they’ll talk to you and take you places.
8. The Enneagram Institute’s Web site (www.enneagraminstitute.com) has an inexpensive test that you can take to determine your personality type. Take it while pretending to be your protagonist and answering all the questions in character.
9. Examine several different “schools” of the Enneagram to see how they present slightly different takes on the nine personality types. This will supplement your knowledge of the Enneagram, giving you even more facility in developing characters for your screenplays.
Research and Brainstorming:
Exploring Possibilities and Opening Up Your Story
he old saying, “Good material can meet you halfway,” is often true. It usually happens in unexpected ways. As you research and explore material relevant to your story, you may happen on surprising information that unlocks story possibilities and lifts your ideas to another level. The material can yield ready-made story elements that mesh magically with the plot you’ve been developing and help tie it together. This discovery process is a large part of the fun of writing, because you often find yourself stumbling into an exciting new dimension. Research can bring fresh air to a project that’s going stale, can grease the wheels when you’re stuck, and can inject a dose of realism into a script with too much imagination and not enough substance. Once you’ve got some solid research under your belt, the process of Brainstorming can really take off. You’ve got great material upon which to build and you’re loaded with genuine options for your plot and characters. Now you can really break loose in a creative explosion, based on great research.
USING RESEARCH TO EXPLORE STORY POTENTIAL AND BUILD PLOT
Research involves exploring anything and everything connected with your plot: experts, books, legends, mythology, current events, history, movies. Research can populate your plot with fresh concepts, factual knowledge, understanding of a specialized world, insight into character types, and so on. It’s the material out of which you construct your plot—the cloth from which the suit is cut. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and research will dig up things you couldn’t have imagined.
The ability to do quality research constitutes an entire discipline within the craft of screenwriting. Tracking down the diverse material that both grounds your story in fact and opens up bold new horizons can be truly stimulating. You become part detective, part librarian, and part amateur aficionado on your subject. There is no substitute for immersing yourself in authentic material. The closer you come to the real people who live it, or to world-class experts in that arena, the more well-informed your script will be and the better off you are.
Go to the Source
Make every effort to talk to a real-life expert on a topic, or to see the real place where your story happened. Firsthand research is the best kind, and will often take you well beyond what you’d been envisioning. Let’s say you’re writing a script about a crooked cop who is forced by circumstances to become honest. One of the first things to do is to talk to real cops. That’s usually not too hard—especially in L.A., they can be even quite responsive to screenwriters. But how do you find a crooked cop? No cop is going to admit to being dishonest, but perhaps you could interview a former cop in prison. Now that’s hardcore research. That’s not just plugged in; that’s sticking your finger right into the electric socket.
A former cop might tell you about a major turning point in his life: Where did things go so catastrophically wrong? Where did he begin to question his criminal ways and look at life with new eyes? The cop’s true experie
nces will almost certainly dwarf your imagined ideas, opening a floodgate of possibilities for your script. A firsthand source can deepen, clarify, and even radically alter your perception of a character’s dilemma, crisis, decision and action, and resolution. The material is meeting you halfway, providing unexpected story potential. Compare your reserach efforts to a long, dangerous trek through the wilderness; the source is someone who meets you at the midpoint with specialized equipment for the journey ahead—maps, supplies, and guidance. And there are so many people out there who might act as that source. Sometimes things come together with amazing coincidence or synchronicity. People and events show up in your life that relate to your story in some way, and the research you expected would be difficult instead unfolds naturally and in fascinating ways.
One example of terrific research is an electrifying HBO documentary called Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. Toward the end of the 1930s, about 100,000 former slaves were still alive; writers from the WPA (Work Projects Administration) interviewed more than 2,000 of them. The documentary presents these firsthand accounts of slave life through readings by today’s top black actors, along with archival material from that period, making that heartbreaking world stunningly real. You couldn’t even begin to write about that era in a realistic manner without exposure to source material of this quality.
Use Great Resources
If it’s not possible to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth, then reading books and scouring the Internet are obvious choices. There are books now that focus on Internet research, such as Facts in a Flash: A Research Guide for Writers, by Ellen Metter. But bear in mind that for all its convenience, the Internet can still be a limited resource. It’s still just sections of certain materials that cannot begin to stack up against a specialized book on a given topic. Learn how to use a library, and ask a librarian to help you. Remember, a librarian has astonishing amounts of information at his or her fingertips. If you need to own the books, buying them used on Amazon (www.amazon.com) or other book sites can save you a fortune. There are also research experts and information retrieval firms which can fulfill highly specific requests.