Every Protagonist has a Signature Sin and So Do I

Last week I mentioned that I received my the first feedback for my work in progress. One of the most challenging things to hear was that the three central characters all had the same voice. This was especially disturbing when I realized that all three characters shared my personality. My novel, in its current form, is a collection of mini-me’s. I couldn’t stand the thought of subject readers to that.

I grabbed my e-reader and reread a few chapters from Gloria Kempton’s Write Great Fiction- Dialogue. She recommends grabbing a book on the Enneagram as a tool to flesh out the nuances of each character. The Enneagram is model for understanding human personality that predates modern psychology by  centuries. (Yes, the Enneagram has some roots in the Kabbalah  and Islamic Mysticism. I tempted to record myself reciting the Apostles’ Creed and embedding itself in this post to calm fears that would only bloat the size of this post. A little trust, then).

The model has a tremendous insight: That each personality has a signature fear that leads to a missing of the mark. Moses and King David referred to this as “transgression” and used the same work to describe an arrow that missed the target. The day after the AFC championship game there’s not a Baltimore fan who would object to that word being used to describe the final play of the game.

I read the book and worked to find which personality trait fit my protagonist. He’s the prototypical Number 3: “The Achiever.” Not coincidentally, so am I. The “Passion” or “fear” that comes with being an Achiever is deceit. Riso and Hudson define deceit as a drive that”causes us to put all of our efforts into developing our egos instead of our true nature. We could also call this passion Vanity, our attempt to make our ego feel valuable with without turning to our spiritual source.”

My Evangelical Decoder Ring translates this to mean “I’m prone to relying on performance instead of God’s grace and love to measure my worth as a human being. I’m not above subverting Christianity and even Jesus into pawns for my own spiritual DIY project.

This is my signature sin. It’s what I do.

God must appreciate my tendency to be a slow learner. My church is studying a book by John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be. Last week I read these words:

We do not get tempted by that which repulses us. Temptation rarely begins by trying to get us to do something that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of our values. It starts close to home with the passions and desires that God has wired into us and then tries to pull them a few degrees off course. The result is enough to pull them a few degrees off course. That subtle deviation is enough to disrupt the flow of the Spirit in our life, so coming to recognize the patterns of sin most tempting to us is one of the most important steps in our spiritual life. (p. 147)

Pastor John says that the pattern of each person’s sin is like a fingerprint and its always connected to our strengths.

Ortberg pulls a list of strengths from a book that draws from the Enneagram. He goes on to suggest that Achievers are prone to become preoccupied with success and are even willing to manipulate others to secure praise. It’s insights like this that keep me from inviting Ortberg over for parties.

And then this morning I visited Don Miller’s blog and read his confession that he’s tired of being more consumed with his reputation than his character. Like I said,  God knows that in this arena, there’s no difference between the slope of my learning curve and that of a bowling alley. Thee days, three different looks in the mirror.

The next task of the book is to flaw every important character with their signature sins. The heroes will become self-aware and find some level of triumph over these character flaws on their way to resolving the conflict. The villains will be the ones driven by their own passions.

Sounds a lot like life.