Last night I attended my local Romance Writers of America chapter meeting, where the presentation was on tarot cards and how to use them to inspire your writing. The presenter passed around a few samples from her collection of 145 decks, and speaking as someone who has never seen tarot cards up close and personal, I thought they were very interesting.

The deck I looked through was medieval-ish, dark backgrounds, pale faces, mostly rather grim. The deck down the table from me, called the Vanessa deck, was decorated with only female images, including one that closely resembled Sarah Palin and another that was almost a dead ringer for Hillary Clinton–she was even in front of a podium!

Mostly the presentation was a little scattered. She wasn’t teaching us how to read tarot cards in the normal sense, she was basically encouraging us to use the cards to brainstorm and get past the occasional writer’s block. For instance, if you don’t know what should happen next, draw a card. Then use the image on that card (or the traditional tarot card arcana, of which I knew nothing before last night, but which includes things like Death, the Sun, the Moon, the Magician, etc) to inject a new element or direction into your manuscript.

At the end of the evening there was a raffle for a giveaway deck of tarot cards, and guess who won them? Me! I was excited…until I saw them. Now I’m more than a little creeped out.

How do you suppose these cards might inspire a light-hearted, romantic story?

I’m open to ideas…

Can you imagine ‘getting your cards read’ with these cards?? I think I’d be terrified.