Rapid Story Development

How to Use the Enneagram-Story Connection to Become a Master Storyteller

Jeff Lyons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317398882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book offers a unique approach to storytelling, connecting the Enneagram system with classic story principles of character development, plot, and story structure to provide a seven-step methodology to achieve rapid story development. Using the nine core personality styles underlying all human thought, feeling, and action, it provides the tools needed to understand and leverage the Enneagram-Story Connection for writing success.Author Jeff Lyons starts with the basics of the Enneagram system and builds with how to discover and design the critical story structure components of any story, featuring supporting examples of the Enneagram-Story Connection in practice across film, literature and TV. Readers will learn the fundamentals of the Enneagram system and how to utilize it to create multidimensional characters, master premise line development, maintain narrative drive, and create antagonists that are perfectly designed to challenge your protagonist in a way that goes beyond surface action to reveal the dramatic core of any story.Lyons explores the use of the Enneagram as a tool not only for character development, but for story development itself. This is the ideal text for intermediate and advanced level screenwriting and creative writing students, as well as professional screenwriters and novelists looking to get more from their writing process and story structure.

Part 1
The Enneagram for Writers

1
It’s all about Development

Development is the first step in the creation of any novel, screenplay, or creative work of nonfiction. When you get a new story idea, don’t write—develop.

When you get an idea for a novel, screenplay, or any piece of creative writing, you probably do the same two things every writer does when a new idea takes hold: you get excited, and then you start writing. Maybe you just scribble down some initial index cards with character notes: “Protagonist: red hair, big nose, works on Wall Street, dies in the end—maybe not—yeah, he’s a dead man.” Or, perhaps you start extensive backstories about family lineages, childhood details, elaborate family trees, and create long spreadsheets of hobbies, interests, and emotional peccadilloes.

Maybe you even start an outline, trying to put some form around the chaos of ideas flooding into your head (but not too much form; you don’t want to stifle creativity, right?). Or perhaps you follow the age-old wisdom every serious writer learns from those great writers who have come before them, “Writers write … don’t think about it, don’t censor, don’t edit, just write… the first draft is always crap, just write and don’t stop… the story will write itself… the characters will write themselves… you’re just the typist, so get out of the way and let the story flow.”

In my experience working with thousands of novelists and screenwriters, I have found there is indeed a small subset of talented individuals who can follow this kind of advice and produce coherent and productive work. They are, in fact, the writers who are the most vocal in supporting the “just do it” approach to creative writing. After all, if it works for them, shouldn’t it work for everyone, or at least be a useful strategy for moving forward on a new project, when there may be no strategy in place at all? The reasonable response is yes. The considerate and fair-minded response is yes. But the truth is—no. For the vast majority of writers, regardless of their story form (novel, screenplay, short story, etc.), the “just do it” approach to writing is disastrous. Why? Rather than “tell” you, allow me to show you by describing what happens with most of us when we adopt the consensus philosophy of “just do it.”

The big idea comes; it drops in fully formed and exciting and filled with hope. After thinking long and hard (but not too long; the spark might go out), you finally have it and you know it will be a great story. Do you now sit with it and consider the complexity? Do you start to “feel” the mechanics of the tale, trying to get a sense of flow? Do you wait and watch and let it all settle? No, that’s not what creative people do; that’s not how writers write; that only stifles the natural creative flow and process. You know better than to delay and risk mucking it up with logic and reason and planning. “Writers write,” so you do what writers do. Your fingers fly, words flow; it’s all gibberish with moments of lucidity, but you knew that was going to happen. “The first draft is always crap,” so you shrug and let it be. “The story will write itself,” and you trust the process (such that it is).

As pages pile up, the writing slows, the flow gets a bit clogged, but random ideas are still coming, your protagonist is morphing back and forth between different images you have in your head, there is no clear through-line that you can identify, story tangents and episodic divergences are now taking over the flow and pulling you which-way-and-that, and the ending is as muddled as a London pea soup fog, but that’s okay, because it will come, this is how it is supposed to be, this is creativity, this is writing—you tell yourself as your anxiety and unease mount.

Finally, one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred pages into your opus, you stop and blankly stare at the word processor and realize: The wheels have come off the cart. I have no clue where the hell this thing is going, or what the story is. Welcome to the writing process equivalent of Dante’s Inferno: “I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.” Lost in writing’s dark wood, now what do you do? You do what everyone does to recover their creative center—you backtrack to figure out where the wheels came off. If you can find that point, then you can just pick up again, right?

Sadly, no, because the backtracking always leads to the same place, regardless of the story, the form of your writing, or degree of “lostness.” You will always end up back at the beginning, at the point of the premise idea itself, because this is where every story goes wrong, if it is going to go wrong at all. Coming back to this point is what I call “backing into the story.” Everyone does it, and everyone ends up in the same place, starting over from scratch. Welcome to the “just do it” school of writing.

What I have just described is what most writers think story development is all about. And not just individual writers: MFA programs, film schools, and creative writing programs in schools of continuing education all promote this worst practice (vs best practice) scenario. But, as I mentioned earlier, the just-do-it approach can work for a small subset of writers, those talented, lucky few who have the development gene. And talented is the key, because this gene is a talent for those few. Talent is given. You cannot learn a talent; it does not come from practice, practice, practice, i.e., craft. Talent is part of your personal grace; it comes naturally to you, like flight to an eagle. Some writers are talented with development; they just “get it” naturally and can avoid the dark wood. Their process might not be the prettiest to look at, but they can elegantly navigate the development woods and produce coherent and productive prose—and for them it feels like they’re “just doing it.” For the vast majority of writers, however, the process is anything but automatic. They may be talented writers, but they do not have the development gene, which is to say they are good at the writing function but not the story function.

In my first book, Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success (Focal Press, 2015), I wrote at some length on the distinction between storytelling and writing. I refer you to that book for a more in-depth analysis; suffice to say here that you don’t need to be anywhere near a word processor or a pen and paper to tell a story. Stories can be written, danced, mimed, painted, sculpted, spoken, and conveyed in any number of ways that don’t require writing or written language. Writing, by contrast, is the act of conveying emotion, thought, feeling (different than emotion), and ideas using the rhythms, patterns, and musicality of language. Writing can tell a story, but it is not needed to do so. Stories don’t need writers, but writers need stories.

This is the context for my point that most writers may be good at writing, but not good at storytelling, i.e., the development function. Development is a function of story, not writing. Writing, like storytelling, is also a talent, as well as a craft, but it is the story skill that most writers lack. And just as you can learn the craft of writing, if you are a weak writer, so you can learn the craft of story. This idea is at the heart of this book, i.e., the idea that you can learn the craft of story development and thereby strengthen this critically important piece of your creative process. Even if you are one of those lucky few gifted with the talent, there is great value in taking an unconscious, or subconscious, skill and making it more conscious.

The Enneagram-Story Connection

It is in this spirit of opening the channels of creativity and making you a more conscious writer that the Enneagram-Story Connection finds its greatest value, because the connection is a natural one; it is not something invented by me or anyone else. The Enneagram, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a natural phenomenon, not some modern creation of a pop-culture, self-improvement celebrity. The Enneagram is a model of human behavior created by us—humans. It exists because we exist, and because we are smart apes with exceptional powers of pattern recognition, over time we have discovered the nine core patterns of our human condition, patterns all humans conform to, regardless of sex, culture, age, or national origin, in the living of life. The Enneagram is the “story” of how we act out our humanness.

In the same way that the Enneagram is not a human invention, while stories may be created by people, they also have an objective realness all their own, a reality outside of the act of human manipulation (storytelling). As Bret Johnston of Harvard University has said, “Stories are not about things; they are things.” Stories are things unto themselves, and we humans discover those “things” in the act of storytelling. As you will learn later in this book, stories are metaphors for human experience; they are about us, of us, for us. Is it any wonder then that the most powerful model illuminating human experience in action should have a natural connection to the act of telling stories about human experience? It is this profound connection between the Enneagram and storytelling that is the basis of effective storytelling. Working with the Enneagram will make you a more self-aware person; telling stories will make you more aware of your human condition; bringing storytelling together with the Enneagram will make you a conscious writer. Being a conscious writer means you can know what you are writing, why you are writing it, and that you are empowered to resist the knee-jerk reaction to “just do it” in the face of the writing consensus’s pressures to write, write, write.

But, in a creative-writing marketplace glutted with quick fixes—top-ten writing secrets; guaranteed tips, tricks, and techniques; and flavor-of-the-month story gurus, coaches, mentors, and “storytelling thought partners”—how is a writer, conscious or otherwise, going to find a way to marry these two powerful tools into a useful and practical strategy for developing a story? The connection between the Enneagram and storytelling may be intuitive and natural, but knowing how that connection can be translated into real work is not so easily perceived.

The Rapid Story Development Process

One of the guiding precepts of this book is that anyone can learn the craft of story development, regardless of their current level of story skill. The other guiding principle of this book is that anyone can learn the Enneagram-Story Connection, and with it a repeatable and proven methodology that potentiates story talent while facilitating the learning process and craft expertise of story development as a whole. In other words, the Enneagram-Story Connection is a natural doorway to learning story craft and blossoming story talent, and the Seven-Step Rapid Story Development Process is the tool that bridges the gap between talent and craft, assuring (not guaranteeing—there are no guarantees) any writer greater success in masterfully creating any story they have to tell.

So, to that end, the Seven-Step Rapid Story Development Process contains the following steps:

• Step 1: Build the Enneagram Foundation of the Moral Component
• Step 2: Define the Protagonist’s Enneagram Style
• Step 3: Define the Protagonist’s Evolution and De-Evolution Enneagram Styles
• Step 4: Identify the Common and Uncommon Pinches, Crunches, Blind Spots, and Distortion Filters
• Step 5: Define the Opposition
• Step 6: Build the Enneagram Elements of the Story Middle
• Step 7: Develop the Premise Line

In Part 3 of this book, you will walk through all of these steps in detail, guided by numerous worksheets, templates, and...