Episode Description:
Welcome to another episode of What If? For Authors! This week, Claire dives into the topic of thinking-oriented writers and explores how leading from the head center can shape your writing process.
Key Takeaways:
Understanding the Centers of Intelligence: The Enneagram divides personality patterns into three centers—thinking (head), feeling (heart), and action (body/gut). Learn what it means to lead from the head center as a writer.
How Thinking-Oriented Writers Approach Writing:
Fives: Intellectual problem solvers who thrive on discovery writing but may struggle with revisions.
Sixes: Planners who sometimes over-rely on outside validation but have incredible gut instincts when they trust themselves.
Sevens: Action-driven writers who crave mental stimulation and often benefit from keeping surprises in their drafts.
Balancing Your Strengths and Blind Spots: Discover how thinking-oriented writers can navigate challenges in their writing, whether that means adding emotional depth or pacing up their narratives.
Practical Tips for Thinking-Oriented Writers:
Don’t overthink your process—sometimes the best way to solve a plot issue is to dive in and write through it.
Revisions can address areas like pacing, emotion, or over-explanation without compromising your unique style.
Support the Show: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share it with your fellow authors.
Join the Conversation:
Share your thoughts and questions by reaching out to Claire at contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If For Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for Authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/sustain. Let's head straight into today's topic because I think it's a nice and sensible one to focus our attention on for a bit.
Today's episode asks, What if I'm a thinking oriented writer? In the Enneagram, we talk about thinking, feeling, and action centers, sometimes called the head, heart, and body centers. Sometimes the body center is called the gut center. All the same, what we're talking about when we talk about these centers is cognitive, emotional, and behavioral schema.
The patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing that we tend to follow as default.
Certain Enneagram types tend to favor one of these three centers of intelligence, we call them, over the other two, and it's [00:01:00] incredibly useful to figure out which one we default to first. It's also useful to think about how the other two show up, or if they even show up at all in certain situations.
Today though, I'm going to focus on those who are thinking oriented as their default. Those who lead from the head center, And how that may be showing up in your writing life. There's no better or worse center to lead from, so I'll clear that up right off the bat. We do run into problems when we try to have our head center do the work of the other two centers, which is pretty common.
So this would look like thinking about our feelings rather than feeling them, which is important to do for emotional and mental health, to feel our feelings. Or sometimes this is trying to justify a gut instinct before we allow ourselves to take action on it, or mistrusting our intuition because it, it doesn't make logical sense to our head center. Those things sound familiar, you [00:02:00] might be a thinking oriented writer. That's how I define it. In my experience working with a lot of thinking oriented writers, , we love solving mysteries. A lot of thinking oriented writers find themselves in genres that lend themselves that like mystery or even horror.
If you write something like romance, the hero and heroine tend to be fairly logical and you'll find that the conflict isn't particularly emotion packed so much as almost logistical.
Types 7 are considered the head center types, they are in the head center of intelligence. But I wouldn't say that 5, 6, and 7 always show up as thinking oriented people. So it's important to not rule ourselves out as thinking oriented writers just because we're not a 5, 6, or 7. And it's important to not assume that we must be one because we're one of those three types.
Fives, yeah, these are thinking oriented writers by and large. This is a very thinky type. by nature. And if you're a five, you've likely been called [00:03:00] cerebral, thoughtful, intelligent, and intellectual for most of your life. So this doesn't come as a surprise to you, I'm sure. But here's the thing, just because you're a thinking oriented writer doesn't mean that you're not an intuitive writer.
This is where a lot of fives get tripped up. I see it a lot because fives do almost everything in their lives logically. And with a sense of rationality behind it, they may expect themselves to be hard lined plotters in their writing. A lot of fives enjoy reading all the plotting books, but when they try to apply that to their drafting, they get stuck.
First of all, you cannot possibly apply all the different plotting techniques to a single manuscript. And what really draws fives in and gets them hooked is solving puzzles, simplifying things that are complicated. That's it for fives. Fives love that. For this reason, a lot of fives are actually pancers, also called discovery writers, at their core.
It's like [00:04:00] throwing all the puzzle pieces onto the table. The payoff for these fives comes from slowly seeing them all click into place to create something coherent. A lot of fives are built to be intuitive drafters.
Now sometimes this intuition , is best enjoyed by a five during the plotting stage, but not always. So I just want to point that out. And if you are an intuitive drafter, I encourage it. It may feel so contrary to how most things in your life unfold, but you still have a gut. intuition that needs to be exercised and expressed.
And if writing is a place where that comes most easily to you, then definitely do it.
If you're a five who's already accepted that you're an intuitive writer, the next place where you might run into trouble is revisions. This is where your thinking center is going to snap online in a big way. And you may be trying to impose literal and logical thinking to sentences that are more abstract and expressive.
And that can create a little bit of a traffic [00:05:00] jam. Those sentences might be best left untouched, but your thinking center is like, but technically that's a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence, so I should change it.
Revisions can start to feel painful if not impossible when these two centers, your head and your gut, collide in this way. Realizing that this is the case, though, can help you practice taking a hands off approach in your revisions. If it's not absolutely wrong, like a typo or a homophone error, maybe your default can be to leave it untouched.
You can make whatever rules help you along, but noticing that your drafting may be coming from a different center of intelligence than your revision can help solve the mystery of why you feel such tension in that process.
The way sixes tend to be thinking oriented writers appears a little differently. Regardless of whether a six leans more toward the pantser or plotter end of the continuum, they tend to cling tightly to outlining and established plotting tools in their process. So this [00:06:00] is less out of necessity and more out of the six's tendency toward self doubt.
The six may naturally assume that anyone else understands how to write better than they do. This can lead to the six struggling to make decisions along the way. Getting stuck at crossroads in their plot and possibly hearing their intuition tell them which path to take but ignoring the information because they don't trust it unless someone they perceive to be an authority validates it as well.
Not all sixes run into this problem, but if you're a six and you find yourself wondering which of the million outlining processes to follow, you may be misjudging what the real issue is. The real issue is likely that you believe there is a right way to write the book and someone else knows how to do it.
But, you are the only one who stands a chance of figuring out how to write your book. And the secret about sixes is that when they let go of the fear of getting it wrong, what they're able to hear below that is an incredibly sharp gut instinct. [00:07:00] A lot of times sixes look more like action types than thinking types because of this.
So if you're a six and you find yourself in that pattern of doubt where you're at a plodding crossroad and you don't know which direction to go, just pick one and take it. There's no wrong here. Right is whichever path you pick, and the path you didn't pick never existed, and never will, and that is as it must be.
See if you can lighten your grip on how others tell you to plot, and get to the root of who your characters are. They'll know the way forward, so listen to them when they tell you where to go.
Sevens are also head center types that don't usually look like thinking oriented writers, and often are not. Sevens are often more action oriented writers. They want to be writing. They want things to be moving along. When things aren't moving fast enough, they may start another project. Some sevens are more obviously thinking oriented writers, though.
It's just that they need the manuscript to be incredibly mentally [00:08:00] stimulating before they're able to take action on it and write the next scene. So if you're a thinking oriented seven, use this to your advantage. If you find your attention drifting from your work in progress, challenge yourself to amp up the excitement and mental stimulation in the story.
Give yourself a surprise twist to work around. I've coached a handful of Seppans who work better with an outline ahead of time, but by and large, outlining your book or writing beats ahead of starting is a great way for a seven to lose all interest in writing the damn thing. All the surprises and shock have already been experienced, essentially.
You know all the twists and turns. There's not enough juice left in the squeeze to keep you slogging through all that typing anymore. For most sevens, dropping in a few signposts along the way is about all I would recommend insofar as plotting out your book in advance. You kind of know how it's going to start, you know a little bit about your protagonist and antagonist, like maybe their Enneagram types.
And you have a slight idea about a few scenes, or maybe even how you might want things to [00:09:00] resolve. That might be what balance looks like between a little bit of healthy focus and a map to keep you pointed in a reasonable direction, and not spoiling all the fun of Discovery and Surprise for you. You'll have to find your sweet spot, but I do want to give any Seven listening to this permission to not plot.
If you find that it spoils the fun of drafting. Your brain likes surprises, novelty, and if it doesn't have that in your project, it's going to start looking elsewhere for it. So work with what you got. If your attention starts waning, throw in something unexpected.
All that being said, the way you look, thinking, action, or emotion oriented, and , , the triad that you fall into if you're a thinking center of intelligence or not, It's all relative, right? It really is about looking at how you function and asking these important questions about it. So it's important to spend a little time asking where you fall here.
Other types can function like thinking oriented writers too, can be [00:10:00] thinking oriented writers. I'm sort of an even split between thinking and action. I like to write beats ahead of time, but not too extensively. And then I, Discover things as I draft and often let my intuition take me away from my beats.
If you really pressed me to pick one, I would say I'm an action oriented author first. Knowing what your top two centers are and what your lowest center is can help you see a blind spot in your writing and correct for that. So for thinking oriented writers, if your lowest center, that is the one you have the toughest time connecting to, is your heart center, your emotional center.
Then your books may have a complex plot, logical characters, and fast moving action, but you might not be leaving room for your character's emotions to really come through. You might not be giving readers an opportunity to connect to your characters on an emotional level as a result of that. For authors who recognize that their heart center is their least developed center, one thing I recommend if you're looking to level up your writing is to add [00:11:00] in a revision pass to your next manuscript where you jump scene to scene and check in to make it clear What your characters are feeling in that moment.
Check on the emotional arc of your characters and see if it's coherent and consistent. Ask how you can dial up the emotions to make their motivations clearer to the reader. You don't have to slow all the pacing to a crawl when you do this. And I suggest that you don't. So a little bit of these touches goes a long way toward keeping the readers from wondering, why would she do that?
Emotions are really important information for readers. If your least developed center is the action center, then your stories might need a little bit of a boost with pacing. You're probably good on plot threads, complications, and maybe even emotions, but you may want to do a revision pass and ask yourself, where am I over explaining or making things so complicated that the action has to slow down to a crawl to allow for all the information to be conveyed?
Not every book has to be a page turning thriller, but even epics can [00:12:00] get bogged down if they go too long without action, without things happening in the physical world rather than merely in the minds and hearts of the characters. Bringing your attention to this as you revise will help you find places where you can cut a little bit of rumination within your characters and keep things moving without losing any sort of important information.
Again, it doesn't have to be major revisions, but just start to notice where you're spending a lot of time in the hearts and minds, through inner monologue or conversation, and consider how you can show their thoughts and feelings through action instead. Being a thinking oriented writer has its benefits.
And it has its challenges. It always will. But bringing awareness to the fact that you are a thinking oriented writer, that it's valid, and that you won't approach things the same way as an emotion oriented or action oriented writer is important to being able to adequately manage both your gifts and your blind spots.
My number one tip for thinking oriented [00:13:00] writers is that you can't know everything just by thinking. Sometimes it takes doing to gather the information you need. Sometimes the only way to solve the plot problem is to start writing through it, to dive in and see what comes up. You might be pleasantly surprised, or you might be like, that didn't work at all, but you'll know more either way.
Not all knowledge can be gained from the realm of the theoretical. Sometimes you need to run the experiment, and get your hands dirty in it, to learn what you need to keep going. So if you're wondering, what if I'm a thinking oriented writer, then I'll say, great. You have gifts that others will appreciate, you may also have some blind spots around emotion and action, but those are things you can build into your process to great effect.
Trying to do things like an action or emotion oriented writer may not work for you, but bringing a little bit of awareness to how you approach writing can go a long way toward avoiding the pitfalls associated with fear based, unproductive thinking. That is, hoping [00:14:00] you can feel certain about an outcome before you take any action.
If you can learn to differentiate between thinking about your feelings and feeling your feelings, you'll be in a great place. And your mind will be more freed up to do what it's made to do, rather than trying to jump in and take over the job of the heart center and the body center. If you're a thinking oriented writer, fantastic.
The world needs your kind of books and your logical and conceptual approach to storytelling. There are readers who are craving it in every genre. That's it for this week's topic. I'm Claire Taylor, and thanks for joining me for another episode of What If for Authors.
I hope you'll come back next time. If you enjoy these episodes, if they've brought you any kind of insight into yourself at all, I would greatly appreciate if you left a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to this podcast. And if you listen to it on YouTube, I hope you'll subscribe to my channel, where I will be posting a lot more videos in 2025. Happy [00:15:00] writing!