Rev up your inciting incident with the Enneagram

Align your main character's journey with their personality type to unlock a deep resonance between your readers and your story.

Hi,

Claire Taylor has done more to improve the quality of my life that any single human who I am not related to by blood, marriage, or business partnership. Several years ago, when I was lost and frustrated, she introduced me to the Enneagram.

She told me I was an 8, which meant I was fueled by anger and lashed out in stress, which sent me down a deep, deep rabbit hole that inadvertently led to The Author Ecosystems, the single most impactful thing I think Writer MBA ever did during its existence.

Her books Sustain Your Author Career and Reclaim Your Writing Career are absolutely essential reading for any writer, and her work inspired the Enneagram chapter in How to Write Irresistible Books that Readers Devour.

So, when I heard she was writing a craft book, I was thrilled and asked if she would be willing to write an article for us.

She said yes, and so I’m so so so so thrilled to turn it over to her. If you want to write better fiction, then you have to check out this book.

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If you’ve ever started writing a story and felt it stall out at around the midpoint, the issue might be your inciting incident. The function of the inciting incident is to move your protagonist from a place of security into a place of massive insecurity. This interrupts the equilibrium of your protagonist’s world in a way that is undeniable to them, launching them into action as they attempt to restore the world around them to something familiar.

This inciting incident is the foundation on which the rest of the story is constructed. It needs to generate strong propulsion. If you overlook this step, you’ll feel it as you write farther into the plot. Maybe the story feels meandering. Maybe you find yourself picking the next scene by rolling a die, because you don’t know what else to throw at your protagonist. You may simply lose interest in writing the thing.

Issues like this can usually be traced back to a lack of internal tension created in the inciting incident.

Not every inciting incident works with every character. This seems obvious when we hear it, but it’s not uncommon for us to have an idea for an inciting incident and then stick a protagonist in there who isn’t necessarily destabilized by the incident to the extent that we need for our story to keep moving almost on its own.

It’s important to consider how the protagonist and the inciting incident pair together and what chemistry they have. The best way I’ve found to evaluate that is by sorting out your protagonist’s Enneagram type.

Maybe you’ve heard about the Enneagram before, or maybe not. It’s a common tool that storytellers are using more and more lately (including at least one famous animation studio that I know about), but it’s also a tool that people commonly misunderstand and misuse, to the detriment of their story.

At its core, the Enneagram is a personality system that assigns numerical types based on a person’s core motivation. The “core motivation” consists of a core fear and a core desire that are flips sides of the same coin. For example, you may fear being worthless, and you desire to have worth. (For this reason, it can be easiest to simply talk about the core fear of each type, and the core desire is implied.)

You can see why knowing a character’s core motivation could be immediately useful to a storyteller. We’re taught from the start to know their motivation, but often this stops short of going deep enough, as people confuse motivation with goals or something hyper specific to the situation rather than something fundamental to the personality.

For the purposes of crafting a powerful inciting incident, we can look at the nine core fears that the Enneagram organizes for us by numerical type.

• Type 1: Being bad, wrong, or corrupt

• Type 2: Being unloved and unwanted

• Type 3: Being without value or worth

• Type 4: Being ordinary and without identity

• Type 5: Being incompetent or incapable

• Type 6: Being without support or guidance

• Type 7: Being trapped in pain or deprivation

• Type 8: Being harmed or controlled

• Type 9: Being cut off or separated

Every character (and person) prioritizes avoidance of one of these fears above all others. In fact, we build our lives around avoiding this fear. It shows up in every corner of our life. Nowhere is safe.

None of the core fears are particularly appealing, but one will stand out as the big one that’s calling the shots. You can think of it as a business meeting where are nine are present, but one is the CEO that makes the final call, and often without listening to anyone else.

We use these fears to assign an Enneagram type. If someone is afraid of being without value or worth above all else, they’re what we would call a “Type 3.” (Each type generally has a descriptor attached to it, so for the Three, you often see “the Achiever” or “the Performer,” but those vary quite a bit from tradition to tradition while the type number remains consistent.)

Readers expect consistency in a character’s core fear, because we instinctively learn to expect that from our interactions in everyday life. Do readers have the language to say that’s what they expect? Not always, but they do know in their gut when the motivation becomes inconsistent, and it’s big points off. This is why the shorthand of the Enneagram fears is so incredibly helpful to align each character (or at least the primary and secondary ones) to a particular core fear.

When it comes to the inciting incident, assigning your protagonist a type is an easy and effective way of making sure the incident you design will sufficiently destabilize the character.

For instance, who do you think would have a stronger reaction to being fired from a high-status, high-intensity job, a Three (fear: being without worth or value) or a Seven (fear: being trapped in pain and deprivation)?

The particulars of the firing would certainly come into play, but when you learn about the Three’s need to be perceived as worthy and valuable, and how social status plays into that, you understand how a sudden firing from a position that offered them a sense of worthiness (especially if they’ve been working to get to where they are for most of their adult life) would seriously destabilize their world and catapult them into action as they attempt to regain equilibrium.

Meanwhile, the Seven might be upset by the loss of income and the sense of financial deprivation, but probably they were ready for something new anyway. Once you learn about how the Seven’s core fear manifests in common patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, you understand that Sevens often hate staying in the same job for long unless it provides a high degree of novelty and variation. Losing a high-status job may be temporarily upsetting to the Seven, but that doesn’t make it a particularly strong inciting incident to drive the rest of the story. It likely won’t destabilize them enough.

If you notice that your protagonist and inciting incident don’t create enough chemistry, there are a plenty of paths to a solution. Where you start depends on whether you’re more attached to your inciting incident or your protagonist’s type.

If the inciting incident was the original story spark that got you hooked, then maybe you change the protagonist’s type to create a more explosive pairing. If the protagonist’s type was more what brought you to the story, then perhaps it’s time to brainstorm an inciting incident that will be a stronger catapult by triggering your protagonist’s core fear more directly.

The Enneagram is a framework that allows both newbies and experts to use it. It can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be.

It’s easy to forget to pause and ask yourself what motivates your protagonist on a deep psychological level. Authors do it all the time. I’ve certainly done it, and I’m “the Enneagram lady” in the author world. There’s a lot to consider and manage when we write, and things like this slip through the cracks.

Whenever you remember to check in on those motivations, though, this reference is a quick way to ensure you’re bringing a consistent character to the pages.

If you’re struggling with the inciting incident, here is how you can get started working with the Enneagram:

1. Ask yourself which of the core fears from the list above resonate most strongly with the character you’re writing. (If you want to see descriptions of how these fears tend to manifest, www.enneagraminstitute.com is a great resource to start, and I’m diving deep into it in my Write Iconic Characters Kickstarter.)

2. Ask yourself how the current inciting incident is triggering that core fear. What elements could you add to the situation to make it even more triggering?
   OR
   If you don’t have an inciting incident in mind yet, what could happen in the story world you’re creating that would jab at the core fear of your protagonist? How could you pull the rug out from under them?

3. Ask yourself how you might be imagining what would trigger YOU rather than what would trigger your PROTAGONIST in this situation.

The last question is often overlooked. As authors, we tend to put a little bit of ourselves into our protagonists. This helps us stay engaged with the character, and we often do it subconsciously. It’s not a bad thing at all! But if we aren’t careful, we may be writing a protagonist with a different core fear from our own without recognizing that. The result is often that we blur the two types together unknowingly, so that the protagonist acts inconsistently.

When it comes to the inciting incident, it’s super common for authors to write something unsettling to them, only to wonder why their protagonist isn’t reacting strongly no matter how they poke and prod. Usually, the problem is what I’ve described. It’s totally cool and fun to write a little bit of yourself into the protagonist, but keep a close eye on whether you’re writing your same type as you are or a different one, and don’t blend the core motivations.

(Learning your type is extremely helpful in this matter, and I recommend the iEQ9 Questionnaire if you want to get accurate results; you can also simply read about the types and see which ones seems most like you, though some folks struggle with this approach.)

So, if you want to spring-load your story with conflict in the inciting incident, there’s no better way I’ve found than using the Enneagram framework.

If you want to become an expert at using the Enneagram for writing riveting, un-put-down-able fiction, I invite you to back my Write Iconic Characters Kickstarter. The campaign ends at 5pm Central on 8/8, so jump in while you can.

What do you think?

• Can you easily see your protagonists in one of these types?

• Does your inciting incident work in tandem with that type?

Let us know in the comments.

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Photo by Tanya Yarosh on Unsplash