You feel a deep, persistent longing. Sometimes it’s for another person, sometimes a place, sometimes a lifestyle, sometimes even a bygone era. When people try to describe it, they don’t even come close. Hell, you often fall short when you try to put words to it. It’s like you have a vastness inside you that’s trying to connect with the vastness outside of you but never quite reaches.
So, you try to express it through fiction, maybe a little poetry. But no one quite gets it when they read your words. You have a sneaking suspicion that even if you finally got the words right to express yourself precisely, people still wouldn’t understand.
Part of you likes that. The fear of being understood, of being comprehensible to others shakes you at an existential level. Only once your full being is understood can your full being be rejected.
And part of you hates being so different. There’s nothing lonelier than feeling like no one could ever connect with you fully.
If you didn’t like reading any of that and seeing that part of you put into words, then you’re probably an Enneagram Type 4, the Individualist. It’s not all somber news for you, though of all the types, yours would be the most okay with it if that were the case.
Welcome back to this series where we explore what motivates us and how we might build a life that works with our creative impulses rather than against them.
Today, we’re talking all about the Enneagram Four, “the Individualist.” We’re going to dive deep into what motivates someone with these core fears and desires, and how we can build a rich and abundant author life for ourselves if this is our type.
If this isn’t your type, I strongly suggest you read it anyway. Not only will it help you write strong Individualist characters, but I guarantee you have a Four close to you, and understanding them will only strengthen the relationship.
At their core, Fours’ desire is to have significance. Their fear is that they’re insignificant. The concept of significance or identity is central to what compels or repels Fours.
Indie publishing can be a perilous landscape for Fours, who are so full of this raw urge to create the beautiful and portray the ugly that accepting payment for such a natural act can feel dirty. Humans are made to create and express, so how would capitalism do anything but cheapen the experience?
“Marketability” is also considered a taboo subject by many Fours, who often believe that the confines of genre or page length or even the most basic accepted rules of grammar and punctuation are anathema to true creativity.
But this belief runs counter to that need of significance. If you want to be a significant creative force in the publishing world (or the world at large), you can’t do that if no one reads your stuff. And people will not read your stuff if it’s incomprehensible, the book cover makes no sense, the blurb is a mess, or your words do not follow the expected and accepted rules for your language of choice.
Only once you hit a certain threshold of comprehensibility can you realistically get the book into people’s hands. Yes! Your work could expand and shape hearts and minds! But only if people know about it. And for people to know about it, you must tell them. You know, marketing. It’s not a dirty word, I promise.
You can price your books at free, if that makes you feel like less of a sellout. Then, only do free marketing. Perfect. Your business is breaking even, assuming you don’t shell out for an editor and cover designer (which you really should).
Now, how are you going to eat and pay rent? A day job? Great! Go for it, if that job doesn’t make you interact with superficial and boring people who make you want to jump out of the window. You’re all set.
If that’s not the case, though, maybe consider selling your books to eventually make enough to quit your office job and devote ALL your energy to your important creative work.
When an Individualist is maxed out, that valuable tendency to find beauty in the darker corners of the world can morph into straight nihilism. Self-pity and the misunderstood artist archetype start to emerge in everyday interactions, which feeds a vicious cycle. Fours insist that nobody understands them, and in doing so, they make their misery incomprehensible to others, which makes them even more misunderstood.
Fours must watch out for this, because an Individualist who has lost the motivation to create hits a downward spiral quick, fast, and in a hurry, and it can end in some unfortunate permanent decisions. That internal furnace of creation turns into one of self-destruction, and I don’t want that for you. You don’t deserve that, no matter what the voice inside your head may say. (As a One, I swing to the lower side of Four when I’m under stress, so I’m intimately familiar with the harmful scripts that play on repeat in that emotional space.)
When I’m working with an Individualist who’s struggling with motivation, it’s usually because they don’t feel like their writing is getting the attention it deserves. They’re probably right, too. The Four’s ability to tap into the broad range of human emotion, to create beauty from the mundane and assign normality to the bizarre is a rare gift that the world needs.
But feeling like you or your work deserve more than you’re receiving is the first step toward this insidious thing called “envy,” the passion of the Four.
Envy stems from the idea that other people are getting the praise or life you deserve without having earned it, while you’re getting short changed or ripped off. It creates a fantasy version of the world where everything is stacked against you. It justifies whatever vindictive attempts you might make to ruin what others have rather than focusing on your own life and the possible legitimate reasons you don’t have what you believe you deserve.
Envy murders motivation. It says that the deck is stacked against you, so why even try? It says that your energy is better spent leveling the playing field by pulling others down instead of building yourself up. Envy is a sinking ship that will suck anyone near it to the bottom of the ocean.
Usually, when Fours come to see me in this state, the truth is that a few cosmetic tweaks may be all that stands between their book selling zero copies and it selling enough to gain serious momentum. But when we get caught in the thought pattern that the universe is against us, it’s incredibly hard to focus on the details in front of us or receive constructive feedback. Most people aren’t great at delivering criticism, either, so it’s worth paying for someone like me who has years of experience delivering honest feedback in ways creatives can take without wanting to run away.
It would be a shame to be a few superficial tweaks away from a breakthrough only to give up before you made it. So, don’t do that. Instead, keep reading.
Each of the nine types of the Enneagram has nine Levels of Development within it. Three are considered healthy, three are average, and three are unhealthy. We move through these levels at various moments of our lives, but we usually have an anchor point or baseline that’s our default. As we unlock some of the unconscious patterns associated with our type, our anchor point can move slowly upward toward healthier levels.
Below are descriptions of a Four in the three categories of development (healthy, average, unhealthy):
Healthy: A self-regenerating creative, profoundly inspired, able to see the beautiful in the mundane, introspective, sensitive, comfortable feeling the full spectrum of human emotions without identifying with them, individualistic and effortlessly unique, intuitive, highly attuned to the feelings of others.
Average: Strong sense for aesthetics, creates a heightened reality through fantasy, interiorizing of the world turns to self-absorption, prone to moodiness, withdrawn, feels they are exempt from social norms, envy of others leads to justification of self-indulgence, creates fantasized versions of friends, family, and lovers (positive or negative).
Unhealthy: Withdrawn and angry at self and others when dreams and fantasies don’t pan out, loses self in paralyzing shame, self-hatred arises, runs off those trying to help with blame and accusations, engages in self-destructive behavior, indulges in altering substances to escape reality, self-harm likely at the lowest development level.
If you’re not a Four, you’re now thinking of someone you know who is. Or maybe even a character. As you can see, Fours can make great heroes or villains in your books, depending on what development level they most often inhabit.
Okay, so how do you use this information to motivate yourself as a writer?
The trick is simple: Remember that nobody can write the stories you have to tell but you, and those stories are important to human consciousness. When you find yourself getting hung up asking the big questions about your own significance in the grand scheme, it’s important to view that as raw motivational power. You can let it fester into negative thoughts like, “Does it even matter if I write this?” or you can remind yourself that these kinds of questions and considerations are shared by everyone, and you’re the best person to explore them because they are so central to who you are.
You were built to write stories that explore identity and our place in the world. This is your gift, and that insatiable longing you feel will never let up unless you plumb these depths. Sorry, but through creativity is your only way out from the thick of your emotions.
Structure can also be your friend. If you feel unmotivated, it might be that you are unable to wrangle your emotions into something tangible. Give yourself constraints, be that the length of work you’re going to produce, what voice you’ll write in, what tone you’ll aim for, or what theme you’ll write to.
Have you ever told 5-year-olds to entertain themselves without any boundaries? Of course not. That’s a bad idea. They will immediately apply permanent marker to your favorite keepsakes. We give the unrefined creative energy of little kids rules and supervision, and that’s when they can most fruitfully enjoy themselves. Too many rules and restrictions will make things much less fun, but as a Four, you’re in little danger of giving yourself too many constraints. But some are needed. You must build channels for your creativity to flow through rather than flooding the entire plain.
Write stories about outcasts, oddballs, and pariahs. Write an antihero. Write from the perspective of an alien landing on a new planet. And write it all for the younger you who clung so dearly to works of art like that.
Your ability to sit with the full range of emotions without flinching is a gift you can offer through your words. People need to see the characters they like and respect run the gambit of messiness. It gives the reader permission to feel. Though you might view your flood of emotions as a weakness, I can tell you that in this stifled world, it’s an innate talent you can model for others.
Every Enneagram type has a wake-up call associated with it to tell us we’re plummeting down the development levels and it’s time to pause, take a deep breath, and reevaluate some of the premises we’re working from. For the Four, the red flag is fantasizing. This looks like clinging to a mood and creating fantasized versions of reality to support that mood.
The problem with this is that we stop seeing people and situations as they are, and that’s not fair to others or ourselves. It took me years to understand why the songs my Individualist ex-boyfriend wrote about me bothered me so much, but now I see that each one was a fantasy version of me—either idealizing or demonizing, depending on where we were in our relationship when he wrote it—but not actually me. Hearing them performed in front of our friends was a dehumanizing experience as a result. He hadn’t been seeing me at all; he’d been seeing his fantasized image of me.
And for Fours, this can leave you trapped in a fantasy that’s like watching the world through a frosted window but never getting to touch and experience it for yourself. As you can imagine, this would make anyone feel even more isolated.
I’ll admit, I’m a little jealous of the work that Fours can produce once they find that motivation and set their mind to it. It’s the kind of art that stops you in your tracks, that moves you, that creates powerful emotions even in the Enneagram types most disconnected from their emotional centers. The Four is so powerful that simply having it as your wing (wing = a type on either side of the dominant type that can be used to reinforce the aims of the dominant type) can turn a Three with a Four wing (Taylor Swift) or a Five with a Four wing (Stephen King) into a powerful creator whose art thrusts us into particular moods whether we like it or not.
It's easy to spot an Individualist writer when you read them because their work transports you, and the mood and emotions of it stick to you like a film for hours, day, or even years after. Edgar Allan Poe—the quintessential Four—writes about this, describing it as a “singular effect” that he aims for in each of his stories. Not sure what I’m talking about? Go read The Fall of the House of Usher and you’ll understand. When I started reading Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (a Four) a few years ago, I put the book down after the first page, said, “Okay, this is going to be that kind of book,” made myself some tea, discarded the bra, and snuggled under a heap of blankets to prepare for the moody onslaught I would thoroughly enjoy for hours on end.
Individualist artists love to play with themes of identity, too. Virginia Woolf does it brazenly in Orlando, and Prince did it in the span of his entire career. Those types of public explorations can challenge the reader or audience to analyze their own identity, which may have calcified over time, with a fresh and critical eye.
So if you’re struggling to put the words down or the words you’re writing feel aimless or like “meaningless garbage,” see if any of these unhelpful scripts are running on loop in your head:
“Is this unoriginal trash?”
“Someone’s already written this.”
“There are no original ideas left in this world.”
“I loathe writing.”
“Anyone who writes faster than I do is turning out crap.”
“If I write any faster, I’ll turn out crap like everyone else.”
“No one will ever understand my art.”
“It doesn’t make a difference to anyone if I write this or not.”
“Readers only like crap nowadays, like the stuff [bestselling author] writes.”
“Books have to fit every genre trope for anyone to read them, and I don’t write tropes.”
“Nobody reads anymore.”
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but every one of these ideas is faultier than the Texas power grid. Each of them is your ego or personal identity trying to spare itself possible injury. Your ego doesn’t care about YOU. It doesn’t care if you ever create anything meaningful. All it cares about it risk aversion. You can say, “Thank you, ego. I know you’re trying to protect me, but I have something important to share with the world.”
Drawing conscious thought to our subconscious scripts is like drawing blood to an injury to help it heal. And that’s how we begin to break these cycles that hold us prisoner so we can move to healthier development levels of our type.
It’s also how we keep ourselves motivated and connected to the work when we’re Individualists.
So, if you’re a Four who’s struggling with motivation:
Honestly, what else are you going to do with your life and all that longing? Express it or it’ll ferment in your gut.
Establish a few more rules on form or process, then let loose with content.
Remember that the path to feeling less isolated is communication, and the first step to communication is expression. Withholding your ideas out of fear of being misunderstood is the fastest way to keep people from being able to understand you.
Learn to spot envy in yourself and use that as a signal that someone has something you want. Then plan action that will move you more toward that thing, taking the power to achieve your dreams and your desired significance out of the hands of the universe, restoring it to you.
When you find yourself ruminating, fantasizing, or spending too much time in your own imagination, go out and engage your senses in the present. This is where you’ll find so much inspiration that not writing will feel impossible.
Build relationships with other authors, even if you feel like the oddball in the group. If you don’t do this, your tendency toward fantasy will fill in the gaps of what you think you know about the community, and if envy gets involved, it won’t be a positive outlook. It also won’t be real.
Try framing “I’m misunderstood” as “I have a unique perspective people can’t get anywhere else.” Don’t dramatize others rejecting you before you even give them a chance to love and appreciate you.
Next week, we’ll discuss how to find your writing motivation if you’re a Type 5, the Investigator. This is the type of Stephen King, Ursula K. LeGuin, Sherlock Holmes, and Severus Snape.