Tarot is often thought of as a vessel for future-telling, though this limits the possibility of tarot reading. The tarot offers an abundance of potential writing exercises for anyone—you needn’t be a high priestess, brooding hermit, or occult enthusiast of W.B. Yeats proportions to begin a tarot practice for creative inspiration and organization.

Ritual, magic, and intuition have become hot topics in the literary world. Jessa Crispin’s book The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide To An Inspired Life details lessons artists can learn from the cards. Writers the likes of Michelle Tea (author of the queer-coming-of-age memoir Valencia) have even penned their own tarot handbooks.

“The Tarot is an ancient story system,” Tea writes, “a pack of cards that tell a multitude of tales depending on the ways in which they’re placed alongside on another.”

Still not confident in your ability to join in the fun? You can find free tarot reading resources on websites like Biddy Tarot that can help you begin your journey.  

As the literary tarot community continues to grow, let’s join in and try our hand at tarot-inspired creative writing exercises. These exercises are meant to be adaptable to all genres of writing, though you may feel free to adapt them to your writing style as needed.

(These exercises will require a tarot deck—if one is inaccessible to you, my creative challenge is to create your own—either alone or even as a collaboration!)

1. Oracular Persona

Draw a single card from your deck. If the drawn card depicts a human, free write a character description based on who is depicted. What are they doing, and why are they doing it? Where did they get the clothes they’re wearing? What troubles and joys live behind them now, and do they know where they’re going next? What secrets do they keep? Where are they kept?

If the card does not include a humanoid figure and simply an object or structure, challenge yourself to decipher the object’s motives and personality as well.

Write a 10 item list, then write a page of action centering your new character. Poets, write a persona poem based on your card.

Research and reflect on the meaning of the chosen card. Are there emotional or symbolic significances you could incorporate in the next draft?

2.  Self-Portrait in Tableau

Draw a card from the deck. Observe the depicted landscape, environment, or architecture. What’s in the foreground, the background? What gathers in corners, what clouds gather at the horizon? Does the landscape imbue you with openness or claustrophobia? What colors are prominent?

Next, write yourself into the landscape. Do you have a feeling of belonging or alienation? Why are you there? Are you safe? What have you explored, and what is new to you? Have you been someplace like this before? In real life or in a dream? Use this free write to jumpstart a scene, essay, or poem.

3. Querent and Creator

The literary magazine Winter Tangerine included this exercise for their 2018 National Poetry Month exercises—write a poem where you create a new tarot card. This is a terrific exercise for those who don’t yet have a deck.

Further questions to consider for this exercise—what rituals are important to the card, and how did you come to learn them? What ancestral knowledge informs the card? Why do you choose these certain colors? What happens when the card is drawn reversed? Is the card a call to action or quiet reflection?

Bonus twist: write an imagining of this card being drawn for someone once important in your life who is now absent.

Tarot-curious after this post, but don’t have a deck of your own yet? There are as many tarot decks as there are sub-genres of literature. Check out the autonomic deck, accompanied by the creator’s experimental novella and tarot handbook To Run Wild With It. Take your time to find the deck that’s right for you. What speaks to your own experience and writing?

For further divination inspiration, check out Little Red Tarot for more ways to incorporate tarot reading into your daily life and practices.

Happy reading!

Reviewed by KAITLIN HATMAN

Tommy Pico’s IRL reads like a fragmented blog post educating its readers on the intricate interweaving of social media, race, sexuality, and mental illness.  It’s a book I would recommend to anyone who spends a large portion of their day online, on their phone, texting, checking Twitter or Facebook, scrolling through Tumblr, etc.

The statements that Pico makes in IRL are as varied and diverse as the content he presents within it.  The reader follows Teebs, a hopeless romantic writer whose most desired lover, the enigmatic Muse, seems to be forever just out of reach.  This doesn’t stop Teebs from pursuing other relationships though – he’s got a long list of exes complete with nicknames. Alongside the romance, Teebs also struggles with homophobia on the streets of New York, the loss of his culture and language, as well as mental illness and, of course, his writing.

Within IRL, Pico demonstrates an understanding of internet and social media culture and slang that few who write about internet and social media culture are ever able to actually demonstrate.  Sure, there is perhaps one or two slightly cringe-y out of date terms thrown into IRL (yes, PWN is one of them), but by and large they are easy to ignore and can be read ironically.

Pico speaks a language that most social media frequenters will understand, and uses that language artfully and with no small amount of wit:

“It

keeps repeating on me

me me me me me me

me me me me me me

meme meme meme”

IRL demonstrates an ability to grasp and wield the proverbial sword of modern age depression humor, something which is very rarely found outside of social media platforms, let alone in a book of published poetry.  In a single line, Pico manages to capture both the destructive nature of depression and insecurity, as well as the morbid comedy that arises from living with it:

“Yr

last thought before

the gutting panic, before

the sure icy blackness:

I am a garbage

artist Which is my default

well for light banter tbqh

but I’m trying this new

thing called ‘Don’t be so

alienating’”

Pico uses a similar, and just as effective tactic when taking on issues of race and cultural appropriation:

“TBQH I’m so freakin tired

Of hearin abt everyone’s maybe

Cherokee great grandma

like, it’s past my bedtime.”

Pico’s humor is sharp and resonating and at the same time it speaks truth in volumes.  This is to say nothing of the way that he has crafted his entire book and voice to reflect the nature of social media; the three fading dots used as titles between poems which effect the feeling of a real time text message conversation with the poems, the creative and realistic use of internet slang, abt, bc, yr, wd, meme, tbh, tbqh, etc., even the lack of consistent punctuation creates a feeling of alternating informality, passive aggression, or sarcasm that those who are full time residents of social media apps and websites will be well familiar with.

All of these themes interlock to form a truly inspiring, captivating and most of all, relatable story of young adulthood and the struggle to find your place within a society that seems hell bent on putting you down.

I love Fairy Tales. They have a timeless quality to them that I find charming. Whenever I’m struggling for ideas for a story (or for a blog…) I tend to see myself going back to them for inspiration. So, in the simplest way possible I thought I’d break down the structure of a fairy tale, and then offer a couple of writing prompts that I’ve either done myself or thought of using.

Disclaimer: I am no expert in Fairy Tales, and you can take parts from this list out or add some in depending on the tale. There are people way smarter than me who’ve written about this and you should check them out, but here are the basics:

Common Fairy Tale Structure:

1a. The Protagonist is given a task to complete.

1b. The Protagonist is in a bad situation out of their control.

2.The protagonist is told not to go somewhere, goes there anyway. In the case of 1a they meet the antagonist because of this, in case of 1b the antagonist is the one who told them to do it in the first place.

3. The Antagonist uses some means of deception to trick the hero into a bad / worse situation.

4. Some form of outside assistance aids the Protagonist.

5. The Protagonist gets to their goal, whatever that may be.

6 . The Protagonist and Antagonist clash, either physically, mentally or with words.

7. The Antagonist is defeated.

8. Happily Ever After

Additional Common Elements:

Magic of some kind or another

Talking or Anthropomorphic animals

A guardian, of some sort.

Transformations

Class struggles (usually with the poor beating the rich or the poor becoming rich.)

Physical representations of human virtue or vice

Child protagonist vs. Adult Antagonist

Deception

Using these elements combined with the common structure, you can write your own fairy tale. But here are some additional prompts to jump start the process or shake things up a bit.

Writing Prompt #1: Mix It Up

To create something new and different, play around with a rigid structure like a fairy tale. I find that if you just change the anticipated order of events  around, even a little bit, it has a significant impact on the flow of the story. It’s challenging but the final work should be interesting, and entertaining to read.  

Writing Prompt #2: Villain’s Perspective

Done in movies like Mirror Mirror, but write your fairy tale again. This time from the antagonist’s perspective. There is an old saying that goes “Every villain is the hero in their mind.” So writing the story from their perspective will help you create a rounded, interesting and perhaps even sympathetic antagonist when you’re ready to revise your piece.

Writing Prompt #3: The Shape of Your Story  

I read an interesting article a few years ago, plotting out some of the most well-known types of stories and graphing them based on the characters level of happiness at the time. There were some fascinating results. So this prompt is inspired by that. Take a piece of writing you’ve done, and graph the mood of the main character like you would a math problem. The X-axis being time, and the Y-axis being the character. If the character is happy, good or in a beneficial situation the graph goes up. If the character is unhappy, bad or in a detrimental situation, then the graph goes down. In the end, take a look at the shape. Does it have hills and valleys? A sharp increase or decrease? Visualizing might prove useful for future revision.

Reviewed by MAYA WESMAN 

Benjamin Percy’s book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction is a joy to read. As a writer, I am always looking for insight from other writers, especially those who are experienced, published, and seem to have a love of passing on the craft. Percy outlines this book in sections that focus on different aspects of writing fiction, making it easy to pick up and read just one chapter in a sitting. The chapters are short, contained essays that not only provide a witty explanation of how to execute certain things within your own writing, but are written in a style that I have yet to read in any other book about craft. This book really is something wonderful.

Right from the beginning Percy dives into the distinction between written works that are considered “literary”, and those that he says are interesting and attention grabbing. He outlines his love of reading as a young child, and how he was always drawn to the books about monsters, aliens, robots, dragons, and everything in between. He discusses the unfortunate disparity between what the literary community seems to see as worth reading (literature) due to its highly intelligent themes and deep messages, and what the community seems to view as rather pedestrian writings (genre), that serve only to entertain young children who have yet to reach the ability to grasp, and truly appreciate “great literature”.

In response, Percy says that while that “great literature” is in fact great, it often loses what he calls the ability to “thrill’. Being the basis for the title of this book, Percy’s support of thrilling content in literature is a welcome change to the conversation that, for years, has been dominated by voices in favor of “classic literature”. Now I’m not saying that you don’t have thrilling parts of classic works like Lord of the Flies, but that’s not quite what Percy is looking for. What Percy prescribes for this ‘thrill deficiency’ is more along the lines of epic, high fantasy, and hard sci-fi. He’s looking for things more like the Wheel of Time series than Of Mice and Men.

Percy’s Thrill Me, extends the conversation within the literary community to include those who simply love to read engaging, exciting books that serve to address people’s sense of wonder and imagination, allowing readers of all ages, interests, backgrounds, and experiences to engage with one another about a common love of excitement that seems to jump right out of the pages.