As far as I can tell, no one learns tarot cards just because you like memorizing 78 different pieces of information and you just love shuffling stuff. You’re learning tarot because you want to USE the cards, right?
One of the best and my favorite ways to use the cards is to help with creative projects. Artists, designers, and writers all use the cards for inspiration, helping to understand our creative projects and our creative process, and particularly for helping us live that creative life.
This video covers the dozens and dozens of ways that creatives (and particularly writers) can use tarot, for living their best life, for creating their best projects, and for creating and telling the best stories.
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Tarot for Mindset
First, writers can use the cards to help them deal with the mindset issues involved with living a creative life.
So most of these issues and struggles are not related specifically to writers. They’re human issues that you deal with when you come up against your creativity day after day.
No matter what form your creativity takes, there are some mindset issues that you come up against when you are being creative, and tarot is fantastic for helping you identify those issues, and helping you find ways to deal with them.
For example, you can use tarot cards to help you find time, energy or commitment. When you are lacking any of those three things, it can help you identify the problem and then come up and brainstorm ideas for the solution.
Additionally, if you’re facing Resistance and fear when it comes to facing that blank page or the blank canvas, tarot is fantastic for helping you identify that and then work through it.
If you’re stuck on a project or dealing with writer’s block, tarot is fantastic for helping nail down exactly why you’re feeling the feels you’ve got, but also helping you deal with addressing them so you can get out of that stuck place and move forward.
Tarot for Inspiration
Tarot is fantastic for brainstorming and creative ideas and coming up with inspiration and juxtapositions that you normally wouldn’t think of. It’s a great tool for sparking new ideas and pushing your creativity into new areas.
Tarot is also really good at defining and refining your unique process. Each writer has a unique process and way of getting things done, and the cards can guide you to find your unique process.
When you’re writing a book, your tarot cards can also be used for the idea-gathering and brainstorming stage that usually happens before you actually start a very specific project. When you’re starting to nail down characters and character motivations, when you’re thinking of scenes and settings and plot, and when you’re looking for worldbuilding ideas, tarot can help you with the idea gathering and brainstorming.
Tarot for Fiction Writers
Tarot can really help you with outlining if you’re a plotter, and if you’re a discovery writer, it can help you during both the first draft phase and the revisions phase.
Not only with your tarot cards help you find your process, but they also help you accomplish that process easily.
One of the most common and obvious ways that you can use your tarot cards for writing has to do with writing fiction.
Your tarot deck already has characters and stories associated with each of the individual cards. It is a natural leap to use them when you’re telling stories, especially if you’re familiar with the three card tarot spread, which has a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Tarot is also really good for characters. It’s one of my favorite uses of the cards as a fiction writer. It helps with the character’s surface level things like personality, occupation, and backstory. But even more, it helps with the character arc, to determine their flaw, their wounds, their ghosts, their need, their external goal and their motivations, where they started the beginning of the story, the limiting belief they have and where they end up at the end of the story. All of that can be developed using your tarot cards.
Tarot is a fantastic tool for writers and creatives, and this just scratches the surface of the many ways you can use your tarot deck as a tool for your creativity.