Ice-breakers: Craft Compelling Characters with the Tarot
Day ~2~ in the Tarot Tent
Welcome to The Tarot Tent, a special five-day event brought to you by The Shuffle.
Each day, as part of this virtual summer camp experience for writers, I’m bringing a Tarot-for-Writers workshop out of my archives to share with you!
Recordings will be available free for everyone for 24 hours, and then they’ll live in The Shuffle library for full-access subscribers forever! PS: full-access subscribers can find details on booking a complimentary mini-spark session with me at the bottom of this email!
As we’ll discover over this week together, summer camp and the writing process have a lot in common. For example, navigating any writing project, like navigating any good summer camp experience, starts with finding your people.
At camp, it’s all about making friends you can find comfort in and adventure with. In writing, it’s all about discovering characters that you — and your eventual readers — feel compelled to follow into the dark.
The forced intimacy of camp creates the perfect environment for building fast bonds — you get deep quick when you find yourself in close quarters, in the dark, in the woods and the wild. The tarot can help facilitate that same intimacy between you and your characters — the cards, like the dark, like the woods, like the wild, tease hidden parts of the psyche out into the open, cracking open hidden desires, fears, and strengths.
Think of the tarot as an ice-breaker exercise dialled up to 11. A camp-counsellor-mandated game of two truths and a lie may have planted the seeds for inside jokes between you and your camp bunk-mates, but a tarot reading for the characters of your novel, script, or story is going to completely change the way you think about your protagonists and antagonists, and alter the course of your story for the better. Trust me — I’ve worked with many writers whose entire stories came together thanks to the surprises yielded by a well-timed tarot reading. (And if you don’t trust me, trust Alexander Chee — the celebrated novelist and memoirist has written at length about his own use of the tarot to deepen his understanding of his characters. )
Speaking of two truths and a lie…
Why don’t we warm up with a little round now, before diving into today’s workshop?
Grab your journal and pen, choose a character from your current work-in-progress (or a recent or future idea!) and note down three things:
one thing your character believes to be true about themselves
one thing only YOU know to be true about your character
and one lie your characters telling about themselves AND/OR one lie others believe about them
Stuck answering these questions? Try pulling a tarot card and seeing where it leads you!
Alright campers, now that you’ve broken the ice with your characters, it’s time to venture deeper. Grab your compasses, your pens, your notebooks and your tarot decks: we’re going exploring.
Below you’ll find our today’s pre-recorded workshop: CRAFT COMPELLING CHARACTERS WITH THE TAROT.
We cover:
How the tarot can help you create compelling characters
How to read a tarot spread for your characters
How to have a conversation with your characters via the tarot
How to use tarot cards to explore the relationships between your characters
I also created a supplementary mini-workbook for you! Get it here ⬇️
NOTE: This workshop was first recorded in October 2023, as part of my TAROTWRIMO workshop series to help writers prepare for NaNoWriMo.
Wherever participants have been invited to share in the chat, I encourage you to share in the comments below.