I already made a blog with some previous ideas on how to develop the conflict of our main character. I mentioned the two types of fixations that fit for a western story. It is first important to understand that as people, a fictional character has all 9 types in them, but they have one more than the others. For our character, I decided to go with a type 6 as a main conflict.
Types 6 are those who struggle with anxiety and fear, as they are part of the fear cluster. They have a deep need for security as they fear the world that surrounds them. One of the two types of sixes are those who struggle to trust themselves and their intuition—they often ask a committee for help in making their decisions. Due to this, they attach themselves to a powerful authority structure (e.g., religion, politics) as it helps them feel safe. They are called the phobic 6. On the other hand, the other type of 6 are those who blindly believe in their own ideals: a counterphobic 6. In the end, both sixes fail to embrace that the world is a dangerous place and still face it. As they try to find ideas that explain their problems and accept them without questioning them, as a coping mechanism, they find ways to blind themselves and numb the painful path of life.
At the beginning, I thought this fit the main character and her story the best. I thought she was afraid of what people could do to her due to her bounty, so she would accept death as punishment. But in reality, she knows what she wants: she wants to be seen by the son of the man she killed. This is a story of forgiveness, both from the son of the man she killed and from her toward herself. It is her leaving the hole she has dug for herself and climbing out by her own means, to some extent with the help of the son.
Types 4 are those who somehow enjoy being in a bad state, and they are really conscious about it. They think they know who they are. They tend to be really narrative about their problems, as they don't want to change them, even though they can. Our main character is an extreme type four; she is literally accepting death before changing. She convinced herself of being the bad one in the story. It is important to understand that she killed a man by accident and in self-defense. Her religious values do play a role in her self-vision, but she is not a 6, as these ideas don't make her feel safe; it's the total opposite—she feels she is the one to blame. Here is where one realizes that she is a 4. She indeed has some characteristics of a 6, but this type of characteristic doesn't determine what type the story is because it is really more about the type of story that is being told rather than the character being religious or not.
So, the narrative structure for our main character's arc is the following:
- Establish the pit she is buried in.
In her first lines, the audience will get to see how she has given up on herself. This will be explored once the main character's past is shown later in a flashback.
- Introduce the man's son.
This is a key plot device, as our main character isn't able to forgive herself; she'll need an element to make her realize she can be redeemed—the source of her guilt. She will find him at the moment the first act ends in order to transition to the second act. The second act will develop the relationship between them. At first, the son will be mad at her, of course, and they will go on a journey toward the town where the father was born because the son feels it is the right place to avenge his father. At the end of the journey (reaching act 3), they will both realize there is no reason for giving up their lives.
- Climbing out of the pit.
Our main character, alongside the son of the man she killed, will face a lot of dangerous situations as they reach the town. Close experiences with death will make her feel attached to it. Also, both of them shall be exposed to the injustices of society, with the goal of understanding how power structures affect others. This is so the son can empathize with our main character, as her "sin" was caused due to abuse of the patriarchal structure. She will finally find the need to live, but she won't realize it until the last moment (a very classic way of developing negative development in fixations). But this story won't be a negative development; it is simply that her self-conviction was really strong, and it can't change out of nowhere, so it makes sense that if it is going to change, it does so under a critical situation, such as facing the destiny she chose. A good resource would be her facing this final test twice, maybe when she finds the son, but he decides to do it in the town his father was born. This gives the script the possibility to develop parallelism and evolution, as well as it may give a glimpse of the type of person the son is by showing him trying to honor his father, but establishing to some extent that he is scared of the idea of killing and death, giving him a stronger reason to pull the main character out of this hole.
I'm really happy with how the story developed, more so taking into account how lost we were at the beginning of the project. Also the enneagram is just a tool that I find useful to understand the characters. As once you create them as a writter you technically can decide what they are going to do, but somentimes this things don't match their actual characters.
Hook, Joshua. “The Core Struggles of Each Enneagram Type - Joshua N. Hook.” Joshua N. Hook, 16 Feb. 2020, joshuanhook.com/2020/02/16/the-core-struggles-of-each-enneagram-type/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2025.
Scriptman, L. (2024, August 31). Writing with the Enneagram: Type 6. YouTube. https://youtu.be/qg1xzb1717A?si=HXWLM34XKKCnovRz
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