AS WRITERS, WE MAY FIND we want to access our inner depths. Perhaps we need to discover what it is we truly want to say. Or maybe we find our work sounding stale, predictable, even clichéd. At such times, if tarot’s Moon were your writing coach, she’d counsel quiet and self-reflection. She’d suggest you allow your dreams to arise—as she does—in both the sky of your mind and in the quiet pond of your imagination. She’d ask you to contemplate your dreams and your writing by candlelight … or by her own white moth light.
While the Moon knows our inward travels may be fraught with misdirection and mystery, she trusts us to find our way through the dark, face what we discover there, and interpret our nighttime experiences in ways that will illuminate our waking lives and bring deeper wisdom to our creative work. If we explore our depths, rather than fretting about how to monetize our writing dreams too soon, she believes that what we bring forth under her gentle glow will emerge a-shimmer with the magic of our own inner light.
Tarot writing prompts
Taking a page from the Moon’s pillow book, try any of these exercises to dive deep into a character’s dreams … our your own.
1) Keep a dream journal for a month, a “moon.” (Take a look at this PSYCHOLOGY TODAY article for suggestions on how to do so.) At the end of the month, review your journal and see if any silvery, moonlit story ideas emerge.
2) Delve into a character’s psyche by keeping a dream journal for her! Let her reveal her hidden self to you through her dreams.
3) Moon-mapping: Write about an incident, fictional or otherwise, according to the phases of the moon.
- New moon: the incident’s inception, its seed, how it starts
- First quarter: how the incident gains traction, its early developments
- Full moon: how the incident fulfills its initial promise (or threat)
- Last quarter: how the incident and its effects wane
- Dark of the moon: like the tide pulling back the ocean to reveal an altered shore, write about what’s left after it’s all over.
4) Write a scene that takes place in broad daylight. Rewrite the scene so it takes place by the barest gleam of the new crescent moon. What’s different?
5) Write a scene in which your character dreams about a situation from her waking life. Of course, dream-fashion, her sleeping self distorts the situation—but in a way that reveals a truth she hasn’t permitted herself to see till now. She wakes, journals about her dream—or tells it to someone—and then acts on the realization her dream has delivered to her. You, writer, take it from there.
Novel-writing inspiration
MARIANNE DREAMS, by Catherine Storr
THE PILLOW BOOK, by Sei Shonagon
THE ART OF DREAMING, by Carlos Castaneda
Thanks to Joanna Cheung for kind permission to use the image of The Moon from THE ANIMISM TAROT.