​My first deck of tarot cards was a present from my best friend when I was 12 or 14: Karen Kuykendall’s Tarot of the Cat People, reflecting our shared affinity for felines and SFF.

​After more than 20 years, this deck and I know each other pretty well. And I tend to feel like the cards reflect some of the boldness and confidence I had as a teenager back to my much more cautious and doubtful adult self, especially when I’m asking about my creative life. They’ve always egged me on to take that leap, throw that hat, do the thing.
 
Interestingly, they don’t work particularly well for me when it comes to brainstorming for fiction. There’s something about them that’s kind of…straightforward? Simplistic? I find they don’t give me much to go on for these purposes, although I’ve always liked the descriptions in their book and the nuanced array of key words and phrases supplied, and they've always served me well for the real world and my own life. Maybe I'm just too accustomed to that context for them.
 
Though the Tarot of the Cat People was where I learned the meanings of the cards, for a tarot spread appearing in scene in a book, I chose to use the Rider-Waite Tarot, since that’s the “classic” tarot imagery.

​I still need to pick up a copy of this deck at some point. It feels sort of neutral or impersonal to me – like, I don’t know, a dictionary – which is maybe why I haven’t gotten to it yet. Hard to shell out for reference material, as comprehensive and useful as it may be.
 
I didn’t, however, hesitate to shell out for a copy of the Mary-El Tarot. After my friend Amazon used it to do a story-related reading for me, I knew I'd found my fiction deck.

 Part of what fascinated me was the illustrations: vivid, splashy, surreal, dramatic. There’s an emotional heft to them, to their weird, lush symbolism. And the book that came with, while kind of rambly and, well, “woo” for my taste, puts a fresh spin on the traditional meanings of the cards that’s been very helpful.
 
And the ethos of the deck just plain appeals to me. From the introduction:
 
“Nietzsche said, ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Thus he expresses the innate fear we have of the abyss, that even to brush against it, no matter how good our intentions, we will be tainted by it. The abyss is most simply, but not only, introspection – looking within yourself. At first that sounds easy to do, but like the abyss, the calm surface is deceptive and in truth it is a bottomless pit that contains many demons and monsters. But, it also contains your own true will: everything you ever wanted to know, and your salvation, but you must be willing to dive, or be foolish enough to stumble.”
 
I LOVE this. It says so much to me about what kind of project spooky fiction really is. I don’t know – I feel like these cards get me, even if I haven’t totally wrapped my head around them yet. I feel like they give me permission to be emo and dramatic and tell self-consciousness to back the fuck off for a while.

Reader, tell me about your favourite decks! What draws you to them? What speaks to you about them? Any particularly useful for writing, and if so, how so?

​In the 20-odd years I’ve owned tarot cards, I’ve mostly read them for myself, seeking clarity when I can’t hear myself think or reassurance when my life feels out of control. They’re a great tool for cutting through all the clutter and noise that obscures your own heart; sometimes you need someone else to tell you something before you can really hear it. I’ve looked at a rosy-looking spread and thought “ah, they’re just telling me what I want to hear” – but sometimes identifying what it was I wanted to hear was actually in itself an insight I really needed. Sometimes “it’s going to be okay” is a message you can’t accept from yourself.

It’s only recently that it's occurred to me to apply the cards to fiction. Probably not coincidentally, it’s also only recently that I’ve been using fiction for a similar once-removed-and-through-a-glass-darkly kind of self-reflection.

They’re too general to be much use for plotting, except in the broadest outlines. I’ve found they speak just the right language, though, for elaborating on themes and suggesting directions for character arcs: the ways people change, the things they need to learn, the things that shaped them, the broad forces pushing and pulling at them.

Three ways I’ve used them to date:

1. Make up a reading for a character. The tarot reading in The Dark Beneath the Ice is entirely directed by me – no coincidences there. I didn’t put the cards in question in any kind of formal spread, either. Framing the situation in tarot symbolism still turned out to be a helpful exercise, though, because of the constellation of meaning that goes with each card; it suggested emotional dimensions to explore that I hadn’t previously thought through and gave me handy symbols to anchor those threads of the story in my head.
2. Actually do a reading for a character. My lovely friend Amazon did a formal ten-card spread for Skye, the main character in my monstery story, that was downright uncanny. Part of it was that the symbolism of the new deck she was testing out was incredibly well-suited to the story I was trying to tell; part of it was that she knew the story pretty well already, given how often I’d been bending her ear about it. I knew the story pretty well myself by that point, but seeing it all laid out like that – and in startling, evocative imagery, which brought a freshness to the ideas as well as new perspective on them – was incredibly exciting and inspiring. 
3. Use them for brainstorming. In the being chased by zombies through the fog stage of collecting ideas for the still-embryonic radio story, they’ve been a great way to cast about for and pin down the way I want things to evolve. I did a couple of ten-card spreads and an “okay, cards, tell me about this character” one-card draw. I looked for visual images that jumped out at me and why – what feeling did I get from this card? How did that relate to/contrast with/emerge from the feelings I was building the story around? I looked for suggestive patterns, contrasts, tensions. And I basically just scanned through my various booklets and online sources and looked for keywords or phrases that jumped out at me. I jotted everything down and circled things and drew arrows – guided free association, basically. And moving a pen around, as a beloved English teacher insisted, gets neurons firing.

MOAR TAROT BLOGGING to come - next up: beloved and spooky tarot decks!