Tarot and You: A Tip on How to Defeat Writer’s Block
by Danny Missroon
“Excuse” card from Grimaud’s 1910 deck Jeu de Tarot
Honesty upfront, I don’t personally believe in the power to divine the future through tarot cards. No guff to anyone that does believe in tarot readings, but I don’t. With that being said, I am the proud owner of a large, and ever growing, collection of tarot decks. On the one hand, I’ve always enjoyed collecting beautiful, physical things, which is probably why I keep having to buy more bookshelves while my Kindle gathers dust, and on the other hand, I’ve often found tarot extremely useful for battling writer’s block in my fiction.
While I don’t think tarot cards can tell you what will happen in reality, fiction isn’t reality. If you’re unsure of where you want a story to go, pull a tarot card and let its meaning guide the “future” of your story.
For example: perhaps we’re writing about two characters, who we’ll call John and Arthur, who are hanging out together and watching some TV. We like the scene, but the story feels like it’s missing some conflict and we’re stuck on where to go. So, let’s go to our tarot deck. Let’s say we draw the Lovers. Ah ha! John’s invited Arthur over to his house under the pretense of hanging out, but really John’s building up the courage to confess that he wants them to be more than friends. But what happens after the confession? How does Arthur respond to this revelation? Maybe one card was enough to overcome our writer’s block—now that we have a blossoming romance on our hands, we have plenty of ideas on where we want to take the story. Perfect, job well done, we can put the tarot cards back on their shelf. But let’s say, for the sake of the hypothetical, that we don’t have any ideas, in which case back to the deck we go. This time we draw the Emperor reversed, which we interpret to represent a dominating, controlling force. Perhaps Arthur reciprocates John’s feelings but is too afraid of what his father would say to admit it. Now that’s a conflict! Let’s draw one more card though, for old time’s sake. This time we get the Tower, signaling a sudden change, and a meteor falls from the sky and explodes the neighbor’s house. Realizing how close he was to dying via meteor strike, Arthur decides life’s too short to care about what other people think and decides to give love a chance—how sweet, I think I hear wedding bells. And don’t worry, in this hypothetical story the neighbor was on vacation in Fiji and has excellent homeowners insurance.
But what if you don’t like that ending? What if you expected the story to go a different, less meteor-centric direction? That’s fine too, it’s your story and the cards don’t define it—when you write fiction, what you say goes. You can always draw from the deck again, or you can just throw out the tarot reading and go rogue. Tarot cards can be an effective tool in helping you to break through writer’s block, but you don’t need to feel obligated to adhere to the cards if you don’t want to. In fact, there’s an old adage attributed to the gangster Arnold Rothstein, “Flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know which side you’re hoping for.” For our purposes we can replace Rothstein’s coin with a tarot deck and take his advice to mean that once you draw a card you’ll know if you actually like where it’s taking the story—and just because I like you so much, here’s a bonus writing tip: not liking an idea is often the first step to coming up with an idea that you do like.
So next time you’re out shopping at your favorite local bookstore, consider picking up a tarot deck—it might be just what you need to get over that next bout of writer’s block.
Danny Missroon is one of the fiction co-editors at Barnstorm Journal. A fiction MFA student at The University of New Hampshire, Danny was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia.