Teneice Durrant, creator of Tarot with Ten, uses various tarot and oracle decks to provide monthly readings for writers, with exercises on using imagery and intuition as prompts. July’s prompt is about developing a love interest or important choice.
Using tarot’s The Lovers to develop a story’s love interest or important choice.
Watch and listen to Teneice's tarot reading for writers or read the transcript of the reading below.
Hi everyone, welcome to another month of On Deck. This is our monthly series where we kind of pair up the Major Arcana of the Tarot with the hero's epic journey to kind of give you some ideas for structure for a story.
This month is the Lovers card.
This is the sixth card in the Major Arcana for the seventh month because we start with zero with the Fool. So let's talk a little bit about the Lovers card, all right? Obviously, yes, it means lovers, romantic partners, you know, romantic interest in the story, but it also means, traditionally, it means a choice. The Lovers means the choice, like that was the original meaning of it and it was kind of like a picture depicting a man trying to choose between two women.
Obviously, that's what it would have been in the past. So we can look at the Lovers as our main character needs to make a choice between two things that they are drawn to, not necessarily logically, okay? So the attraction of the things that they need to make a choice between is not logical, it is heart-based. So it's kind of like this, you know, make the choice with your gut and your heart, not with logic, okay? So they need to make some kind of bodily intuitive choice about something. Logically or not, doesn't matter if it's logic, if it makes sense, it is what your main character feels in their gut, okay?
And obviously, of course, the other way we can look at it is this is where in the storyline, the narrative arc, this is where we introduce the love interest, okay? So this is maybe where we can kind of think of the tropes like enemies to lovers or, you know, boy or girl next door or however you kind of want to think, like rivals or unwilling co-conspirators in the beginning, like they have to work together.
So however you want to take that idea, that trope, and work it into your story, this is the point in the story where some kind of partnership, alliance, attraction is discovered, okay? So let's pull some more cards and see what kind of prompt we can get for this week. And again, I am using the Morgan Greer deck. It's my favorite deck, but obviously the pictures are a little bit different than the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith.
Knight of Swords
So let's see what, you're just flying everywhere. Okay, let's see what kind of energy we can pull for this writing prompt. And again, just use this as a starting point.
You can even do kind of a visual prompt where you just look at the cards and write down the different elements and see kind of what, you know, what path you go down, what triggers your creativity. So let's see, we've got the Knight of Swords so far. So somebody is convicted about something to the point where they are willing to die for it.
There's like an honor, a chivalry, a code, like, you know, the knight goes into battle, he's willing to die for his king because he believes in the cause. Okay, we'll go with that right now. All right, so let's scoot these a bit and we'll go Knight of Swords.
And I do think that this is supposed to be reversed. Now I don't normally read reversals, but I just kind of got the feeling that this is something that is challenging this pair here that will need to be kind of resolved or worked through as part of the storyline. So we've got this choice or this pairing, this something here that your main character needs to do because of feeling and gut instinct.
So the cards that we have going with this are the Knight of Swords, meaning ready to charge into battle, ready to move forward, maybe a little carelessly, but sometimes we need a little bit of carelessness to get up that bravery to go into battle, right? If we knew all of the things and if we took too long to kind of logic everything out, we might lose the battle, so there's a sense that we have to move on this, and not moving would be a worse mistake than moving and being wrong about it, okay? Meaning if you don't go into battle, you might get captured and killed. If you do go into battle, there's a chance that you won't, you might win, something like that.
Ace of Pentacles
The Ace of Pentacles is an opportunity that has been taken away, an offer that was made and then like rescinded.
It's like somebody kind of tantalized, like they kind of set this like, well, you know, if you do this, if you win this battle, there's this opportunity for you, so then the main character goes and wins that battle and then they say, oh well, no, we need you to do something else, or you didn't do it in this way. So there's a bit of trickery, like somebody gets hoodwinked or, what's the word I'm looking for, like has the rug pulled out from under them, okay? This causes one of two things to happen, okay?
Temperance
So here we have the Temperance, which is the card of making something out of nothing. It is the card of taking what you have and creating something bigger than its parts.
The metaphor I like to use is, for me, this card always stands for art in the way that you can look at a Picasso and you can say, well, the paint costs this much money and the brushes cost this much money and the canvas costs this much money, so there's like a literal, a literal price for it, like how much did the canvas cost, how much did the paint cost, how much did the brushes cost? But there's an un-nameable kind of energy magic that the artist gives to these basic supplies that makes this piece of art transcend the literal cost of it, okay? So Temperance is like taking raw materials and making art out of it, taking raw materials and making something worthy and, you know, I don't want to say perfect, but making something spectacular out of it, okay? The Temperance card here, he's got one foot in the water and one foot on land, so he's kind of balancing the emotional current, his emotional feelings, with the actual physical things that he has to work with, okay? This is also kind of the iconography of turning water into wine, and the Temperance card represents Sagittarius, the Gemini card or the Lover's card represents Gemini.
A writing exercise
I don't know if that figures into your storyline at all, but that's some information you might want to include with your characters. So what we have here is that our main character has either fallen for somebody who has gone through this trial or the main character needs to make a decision.
The decision that they make leads them on this path, so they go and fight for something, they get kind of played, like they get somebody who is deceitful with them; but what happens is they take that experience and make it something even more spectacular. So it's kind of like a blessing in disguise in that if they would have accepted this thing, they would have been stuck there, whereas since they got rejected or they said, oh no, you know, you still need to do this, and then the main character walks away and is like, you know, that's bupkis, I'm not doing that, you promised me I'm leaving, and then they are on this path here. You can see this path that leads to the mountains, which is overcoming obstacles and success, and he's got the sun behind him, also a sunrise here, so there's double sun, and kind of transcendence.
So hopefully that gives you some good ideas for the month of July as we kind of work through this narrative arc using bits and pieces, using the Major Arcana from the tarot to help us work through some places where maybe we're stuck. You can also look at these cards just by the way of like, in terms of like physical characteristics or like places, maybe, you know, you needed some inspiration and the place, you know, the setting is by the ocean, or it's in the mountains, or your character has blonde hair or red hair or brown hair, like you can use these cards also as inspiration for your actual characters.
What did you think of this tarot reading and the cards as visual prompts for story development? Share with us in the comments, and contact us if you’re interested in working one-on-one with Teneice in part 3 of Writing Toward Balance and Wholeness: Tarot and the Narrative Arc (taking parts 1 and 2 first is not required).
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