Tarot for Writers
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Creativity is an intuitive process. Creativity is a spiritual process.
Writers tend to neglect this part of the work. This is not entirely our fault.
With all the modern focus on MFAs, national awards, and professionalization, writing has become a career. Capitalism's heavy hand is always on the lookout for a spirit to suck dry, if it can't crush it altogether.
Artists, of course, have the strongest spirits. We are particularly susceptible to this imposition. Mix that with the natural ambition and perfectionism of many writers, and you have a recipe for soulless work.
When we read the great intuitive writers, another picture emerges. There's no doubt about the soul within Toni Morrison's oeuvre, or Octavia Butler's, or Lucille Clifton's.
I cannot say for sure how those women wrote. What I can say is that all three of them we're open about the spiritual and intuitive parts of their practices.
For many of us, a tool like tarot can open our intuition.
This is because tarot gives us an opportunity to be introspective, to turn inward, and listen deeply.
Intuition is a combination of listening to the self-inside one's self, and applying what you gather there to whatever task is at hand.
So let's get into some points of intuitive intervention for writers.
When You're Deciding What to Write
I'm predominantly a poet.
I won't say this makes my work easier than other writers, but it does permit me the occasional literary boondoggle.
The rest of you must decide, and do so firmly.
We have all read a novel, article, or other literary work that simply could not decide what it wanted to be in life.
Is it a cozy mystery or a romance? Is it radical or apolitical? What does the character even look like, anyway?
Specificity is more than a rubric, or lecture, or whatever you fiction writers do. Specificity is a set of decisions applied dutifully and well.
If you want to stay within the some guardrails you can't do better than finding a way to revivify the familiar.
There is nothing more familiar than archetype.
So choose an archetype and allow a character to embody it. Choose an archetype and allow a character to encounter it. Choose an archetype and make your character live through it.
Or draw a card and allow it to inform your decisions. Allow it to complicate what you thought you knew about a poem, a song, a story.
As Jorie Graham wrote in the poem "Tennessee June," from her book A Hybrid of Plants and Ghosts "Oh/let it touch you..."
Let the archetype touch you. Let the archetype inform you. Let the archetype transform your work by transforming the decisions you make.
A black person with light skin drawing a tarot card. the text say TAROT FOR WRITERS with a green background and GET THE SPREADS with a lilac background.
When You're Deciding How to Write It
It's 2am and you're at your kitchen table staring at the blinking cursor on your laptop.
You know that you pitched this article, but you seem to have no memory of the grand writerly plans that led you to do so.
This idea once luminesced in your mind. Now it seems about as bright as the ramblings of your dullest classmate at yet another wine-soaked student mixer.
Will the assignment due to your editor by 10am PT write itself? Will you wake up at 5am after a brief nap and try to power through it, like you're promising yourself right now?
Did that work the last time you made that promise to yourself? Nope!
Why not try a different approach?
Writing by tarot's archetypes is simple. You pick a card from whatever deck is nearest. Do not choose one by looking through the cards. That's not intuition, that's force.
Shuffle and draw a card. Now see how you can embody it as you write your first draft.
Think of the archetype you selected not as an avatar, but as a persona. Consider the wisdom this way of being could offer your topic.
What does The High Priest/ess have to say about climate change? How would The Empress approach an article on the WGA strike? What would does the Four of Pentacles bring to light in a poem about an absent father.
Only you and that archetype know. That's kind of beautiful, isn't it?
When you share these mysteries of the writing life with the archetype you drew, you have a writing partner. You are a pair, a team. You can approach the work together.
When You Don't Know If the Writing's Done
We've all seen a 1000 word article that, in reality, stopped after the first 500 words.
Who among us hasn't read, if not written, a baggy novel or a collection of poems roughly fifteen poems too long?
You don't have to be that writer who can't say no, who can't let go.
Everything must end in time. Not just "in time," but in its own time.
One of the hardest parts of being a working writer is getting past you wishes for a work. Only then can you allow the writing to fulfill its own wishes, its on wants, and its own work.
It's only then that you can respect the life of what you made.
Tarot is one way we can learn to let go. This is not only true for writing, but it is certainly true for writing.
Writers, how do you work with tarot? Let me know in the comments, and get your free download 5 Tarot Spreads for Writers here!
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