Portals & possibility

On using tarot as a memoir tool

Hi little coven.

The first time a friend convinced me to let her read tarot for me, I was reluctant: I didn’t want to know the future. I didn’t want to feel defined by a psychic prediction I had no agency over. Today, that remains true. If it feels ironic that despite this, I now read tarot for a living, it’s because the mainstream perception of divination rarely gives the cards credit for their wide application beyond future-gazing.

Here is what I’ve found: the tarot, in psychic hands, may indeed function as a fortune-telling device, but for us mere mortals, this pack of 78 images printed onto cards has a different, but equally magical purpose: it facilitates storytelling.

Within these cards are what the novelist and tarot expert Rachel Pollack called “78 degrees of wisdom”—portals of possibility and guidance that allow us to examine our life experiences by unpacking memories, desires, and fears we know intimately, but may have never thought about in context with the wider narrative of our lives.

But the tarot can be more than a tool for exploring and reflecting on the story of your life—the cards can pave the way to help you tell that story to readers.

In her memoir, Vesper Flights, author and naturalist Helen McDonald observes “how unerringly the cards reflect my deepest states of being, emotions I’d not let myself feel at the time.”

Autofiction author and memoirist Alexander Chee, whose Substack “The Querent” takes its name from the formal title given to a person receiving a tarot reading, has written often about his relationship with the cards. In a piece published this summer, Chee remarked: “What I like about the Tarot is how it makes me think of my life holistically.”

Sylvia Plath drew on tarot imagery to examine her thoughts and experiences in such poems as “The Hanging Man,” “Daddy,” and “Ariel.”

The tarot can help you reflect on your deepest states of being, in Chee’s words, “look holistically” at your life, and ultimately create art from the stories you find waiting for you when you explore your experiences through the lens of the cards.

The Fyodor Pavlov Tarot photographed by Chelsey Pippin Mizzi

Here are three¹ methods you can play with to help you leverage tarot cards as tools for exploring your life stories and transforming them into personal essays and even full-length memoirs:

Use a tarot spread
Spreads give tarot cards additional context and narrative shape, and can help you ideate and identify the big story points and subject matter of an essay or book.

The simplest, most classic spread is “Past, Present, Future,” in which three cards are drawn: one to represent past circumstances, one to represent present circumstances, and one to represent future opportunities or new paradigms.

You can use this spread to make notes on what memories, experiences, desires, and fears can illustrate your life stories. To experiment with this method, draw three tarot cards and place them on the table, assigning each one to represent “Past” “Present” or “Future.” Review the cards you draw and explore how they can help you craft a personal essay, chapters, or scenes in a longer form project. You can also draw cards in this structure to reflect on and/or generate the overarching storyline of a book-length memoir.

For a more in-depth experience, you can draw cards in a ten-card Celtic Cross spread formation, and take notes on how each card represents an experience from your life, then combine those experiences into a full story.

Coming soon tarot journaling club: A dedicated session on the “Creative Cross” — my twist on the Celtic Cross, tailored for writers and artists. Become a full-access subscriber to The Shuffle to access the upcoming workshop, and all weekly live and recorded journaling sessions.

Draw out thematic threads using tarot suits
The tarot is divided into two parts: The Major Arcana, and the Minor Arcana, which is further divided into four suits: The Cups, The Pentacles, The Swords, and The Wands. Each suit has a strikingly different tone, and tells a different thematic story. If you have a sense of the story you want to tell already through your essay or memoir, you can use the suits to help you further ideate and explore while staying on theme.

To try this, separate your deck out by suit, and set the Major Arcana aside. Choose a suit that you feel most closely matches the mood, theme, or energy you want to convey through the story you’re telling. Then try to generate material about that theme by writing in response to the images of all 14 cards in the suit. Pay attention to any patterns that arise as you write through the cards: do multiple cards bring up the same experience or subject related to your theme? Which cards feel intimately personal to your experience, and which cards invite you to widen your aperture and look at your story through a broader point of view?

Challenge yourself to write 500 words about how each card relates to the theme of your essay or book, and see how much material you can generate.

Generate a full first draft using all 78 tarot cards
If you want to speed through what Anne Lamott lovingly coined the “shitty first draft,” tarot is a great way to generate material and save yourself the blank-page fear of having no idea where to begin.

Every day, draw a tarot card. Note down some experiences, people, hopes, dreams, fears, and reflections from your life that the card brings to mind. Write 1,000 words in response to that card.

If you like, you can reread the previous day’s material and reflect on what might come next in the story, and write about that, in addition to your tarot-fueled generative writing for the day.

Be consistent in this practice, working through the deck until you’ve written in response to all 78 cards. Do this, and in less than three months, you will have generated 78+ scenes/sections and nearly 80,000 words (the length of an average manuscript).

Will you need to edit this tarot-generated manuscript to pieces? Of course—what first draft doesn’t drown in red pen?

Will you have a wealth of meaningful, raw material to carry you into the next phase of your drafting process? Most definitely. What arises through this first, card-assisted draft will unearth crucial information that informs later versions.

Will the tarot have completely overhauled your approach to telling the story of your life?

I don’t need to pull a card to feel confident the answer is yes.

An expanded version of this essay appeared in Literary Hub in October 2024.

For more tarot tips for writers, catch my FREE workshop as part of the Write Your Own Way Summit, taking place this weekend!

Featuring over 30 speakers, including headliner

Amie McNee

, and organiser

Monica Hay

, the summit is designed to help writers discover unique ways of finding inspiration, carving out their own unique path to success, and caring for themselves along the way.

My talk, Unlock Writer’s Block with the Tarot drops at 4pm GMT / 11am Eastern / 8am Pacific on 2 February. It’s free to watch live, and paid tickets are available to get all 30+ replays to watch at your own pace + other bonuses.

1. For an additional exercise, check out the original version of this essay, published in Literary Hub.