Profession-Key to Backstory

After studying the Enneagram that details personality traits, I discovered a correlation between a person’s profession and their backstory. The Enneagram Institute lists many examples of real people throughout history, as well as fictional characters, with certain personalities and professions. Surprisingly enough their backstories are also similar.

For those of you that follow my blog, you know that I consider the Enneagram the magic tool in my Writing Trunk to creating fictional characters. 

But I also feel like I’m stealing—yep, I feel guilty about owning the key to my character’s backstory made readily available by using the Enneagram.

Below I’ve created a one page chart Profession-Backstory Relationship (pdf) for you to add to your arsenal of tricks in an effort to help you, as a writer, to more easily identify what backstory your character might have and how their backstory correlates to their profession.