Spread: Telling Your Story

While I was working through The Card Geek’s Guide to Kipper Cards by Toni Puhle (the Card Geek, now Toni Savory), I started to think about the unique brilliance that the Kipper “main characters” (the hauptperson significators) offer as a metaphor for narratives. And I took the Card Geek’s “main character square” for understanding a person as a pivot point.

I’ve used tarot to create fictional narratives for many years, and some of the first tarot spreads that I created were designed to help other creative folk find unique and soul-inspired prompts. And I think it’s great to practice reading new techniques using fictional people and fictional situations. But I hadn’t actually tried to create a fictional person.

And I’ve used nine-card squares like the Kipper main character square to understand people. After all, many tarot readers cut their teeth on similar concepts using the six central cards of the Celtic Cross. And once you know Lenormand, a nine-card square becomes an obvious choice for a powerful and simple grid.

But I hadn’t thought about combining my love of self-examination through divination and prompting fictional narratives until I worked my way through the Card Geek’s book.

The beauty of the Kipper card system is its flow,* which includes built-in card interactions and the importance of movement between cards as seen in an actual tableau. But that doesn’t always translate easily to tarot, which can be harder for some readers to understand in that fashion, so I’ve tweaked the openness of the Card Geek’s Kipper spread to suit a broad swath of tarot readers with Part A of Telling Your Story (the Main Character definition). The final card as “the primary obstacle” is explicitly taken from the Kipper spread. I’ve never seen a problem card in that position before The Card Geek’s Guide, but I like it, so I want to honor that source.

*Kipper’s flow why I’m so excited to be working with Siolo Thompson, creator of my much-beloved Linestrider Tarot and Hedgewitch Botanical Oracle decks (along with others that I haven’t played with as much), to introduce the world to a beautiful new Kipper deck designed around the inherent flow of genderqueer mermates, our Seaborn Kipper.

PART A. The Main Character

In Part A, you define key aspects of your main character using nine cards. There are not specific questions because this is a sketch of a person, not a specific unique individual. But if you need help presenting these ideas to your cards for response, you could say, “Please tell me the … [card position] … of/for/in your story” (or similar).

1. Description / Theme

2. Major Past Struggle

3. Pivotal Future Event

4. Overriding Concern

5. Emotional Undercurrent

6. Unspoken Fear

7. Irrational Passion

8. Driving Ambition

9. Primary Obstacle

Once you have laid the cards, you can then use your intuition or visually analyze the cards as they appear in the grid to find connections that help add nuance. There will be some connection between the cards in the same column or between the cards in the same row. But you may find interactions or resonances between cards that don’t obviously flow into each other, and that’s part of the beauty of tarot (and tableau) readings, so use it.

With the main character fleshed out, you should have a good sense of their backstory and where they are ultimately headed (and how), but you might need help kicking off the story, which is where Part B comes in: it’s the inciting incident that begins the conflict or the archetypal hero’s journey.

PART B. The Inciting Incident

Place the first card from your square down and draw three more cards to create a simple sentence or sequence of events using keywords, visual features, or initial impressions.

Now combine the details from your main character in Part A with this inciting incident. Consider where the character has been in their life, what drives them (through ambition and through passion, through head and through heart), and how this event could feed into both their primary obstacle and that pivotal future moment where they see change.

Last, and maybe most importantly, ask yourself if this is fiction or real life, and then tell the story you want to tell. The inciting incident is just the start after all. What happens next?

You can use this spread for creative inspiration. But it doesn’t have to be used only for fiction. The beauty of fictional narratives is that they can help us work through our own struggles without having to recognize them as such. In narrative therapy, a form of therapy I explored for a few years, you revisit past situations and retell them so that they resolve in a way that you would have wanted. It’s can be very empowering and deeply healing. Add in divination, which is typically future-looking, and you can take this impulse to write a fictional story or to rewrite the past and instead write your own future. How can you not love that journey?

Ready to use tarot to help your writing even more?

You can now benefit from my huge writing tarot challenge, the Page of Pens Challenge, published last NaNoWriMo. And if you want to learn how to use tarot better for finding inspiration and clarity in your written works (and real life), sign up for Tarot for Writers.

Want help creating your own layouts?

You’ve got options! Join my upcoming semester of tarot and take advantage of 20+ office hours, where we can talk through your ideas and how best to ask the questions that matter most and create a custom signature layout for you.

Can’t wait? Sign up for my intensive fundamentals course for new and experienced readers, Read Tarot like a Nerd, where we get into the heart of asking questions that matter, along with a dozen or two other valuable topics to take your tarot readings beyond the basics. Or check out my Saturday seminars, including past recordings of Reading the Big Picture and Getting Intentional, which will help you create your own spreads.