Writing by Tarot: An Experiment
My digital footprint is littered with abandoned novels. I have over a dozen folders of brainstorming documents, research, outlines, and usually a few pages of actual drafts. The ideas whirl around in my head for years afterwards, but it’s a struggle to translate them to the page. I’m a perfectionist and a self-saboteur, so it feels like I shouldn’t write anything down until it’s fully-formed, well-plotted, and phrased eloquently. Sometimes it seems like my entire creative life has been this struggle to get out of my own way.
So I’m going to try something new: using tarot to brainstorm and break through writer’s block. There’s one particular idea that’s been calling to me lately. In fact, it’s a story about ephemeral and digital footprints, the traces that survive from the past and the stories we try to tell with them in the present. It’s about sapphic women fighting for their own liberation (I’m thinking loosely anarchist nineteenth century feminists) in a world that hates them, and the ways they must hide, distort, and erase the truth of their lives to survive. It’s also about a modern protagonist who stumbles upon fragments of their story and struggles to fit the pieces together while being subjected to some pretty dystopian bullshit of their own.
That’s all I have: the seed of a metafictional story, a loose cluster of character concepts, and a strong sense of the themes. I’m also interested in exploring constrained writing and randomness as a creative practice. This feels like the perfect project for that. What if I used tarot spreads to flesh out some of the characters and relationships? What if the tarot prompts can help me create a whole trove of documents documenting the historical characters’ relationship and radical activism? I could then use a random number generator to decide which survive for the present/near-future protagonist to stumble upon.
I’m hoping this will allow me to accept the unfolding and imperfect nature of the story, to view it as an organic thing I’m documenting rather than something that needs to be planned and wordsmithed to perfection. My irregular bouts of tarot learning have also led me to connect more with my intuition and use free-association to break down the mental walls my anxiety is constantly building.
Here goes nothing! I initially designed a more complex spread with a bunch of outstanding plot and character questions but got overwhelmed. So let’s start small and pull four cards: two representing the historical characters, one representing how they met, and a fourth card representing the modern character.
Historical character card #1: The Chariot
Willpower, determination, discipline, commitment, positive sense of ego, victory. To me this represents a character who is ideologically committed to the cause and perhaps more militant in her methods. Maybe raised in a military family? Very regimented and disciplined, perhaps rigid to a fault.
Historical character #2: Ten of Wands
Overextending yourself, struggle, restrictions. The first thing that came to mind was making this character disabled in some way. I’m sensing an inherent tension in the relationship between the two characters: the first, who is determined and self-sufficient, struggles to accept her lover’s limitations. Perhaps this character feels torn between her family life (financial problems?), the political/feminist cause, and her love.
How they met: Five of Cups
Loss, bereavement, regret, abandonment, trauma. The first thing that came to mind was the death of a mother. One character’s mother died and the other was hired as household help? Or sent to an orphanage or foster family where she met the other? I’ve always wanted there to be some degree of class differences between these two characters, but I haven’t worked out exactly in which direction yet. Having the more determined, hardcore character be working class and the delicate, conflicted character be middle or upper class feels too trope-y to me. Maybe the disabled character is working class (industrial accident or something similar caused the disability?) and feels the wealthier character’s ability to totally commit to the cause is partially a product of her class and able-bodied privilege.
Modern character: King of Wands
Creativity, charisma, energetic, self-centered. This has given me the idea to make the modern (or possibly near-future) character an artist who is seeking out stories of queer activists from the past for some sort of creative project. I had previously struggled to figure out how this character would encounter the surviving documents from the historical characters (I hate the cliche of a cache of documents forgotten in an attic somewhere), but this makes much more sense. The self-centered aspect also ties in perfectly with this character’s journey: they initially feel a sense of ownership over the historical characters’ stories, but come to understand that they aren’t owed anything, not even the truth, not even if they relate to or sympathize with the historical characters. They grow to accept that the historical women had a right (and a very good reason) to erase themselves from history.