Tonight, I split my time between research and rewriting.

When it comes to crafting interesting characters, the task fells daunting. I found that using personality typing system was useful in creating three dimensional characters. I chose to use the enneagram system. Tonight, I spent an hour researching type one of the nine personality types in the enneagram.

Type 1 is the Reformer. This character is the true believer. They have a strict moral system that they judge themselves and other by. Their world is very black and white. They value self-control, orderliness, and fair and just rules. In health, they learn flexibility and to relinquish some control over their world. Under stress, they slip into a fantasy world with no consequences, then their shame causes them to self-flagellate. They are the type to binge on junk food, then run on the treadmill for an hour as punishment for their failure.

The enneagram, like fiction writing, focuses on a core fear and desires that motivates people’s behavior. For the type one, their core desire it to be good. Their fear is that their moral code and world view is wrong and dangerous. They fear realizing that they are villains or hypocrites (in the case of the stressed one).

There’s a lot of room to play around with this character type when creating both villains and heros.

The second half of my night was spent rewriting a third person scene into first person. I also added in a confrontation with one of the antagonists. As my heroes pursue their goal of adventure and discovery, an antagonistic force that appears earlier in the book shows up to get in the way of their success. The scene originally lacked tension, and the antagonist had disappeared from the story without resolution. This solves both problems.