(Tarot Prompts for Writers)
Keep the image and meaning of The Sun in mind as you develop a story. But go beyond the card — don’t stress about any aspects you “should” include. The card is just a tool to prompt ideas. You can take it anywhere. Write a bright story.
First line prompts
- “Don’t ever peek over that wall,” our mother told us a thousand times.
- There was something on the face of the sun that no one had ever seen before.
- You won’t believe it, but there is a world where children are happy.
Continue the scene for another 500 words, in any direction you wish to take it. Change to third or first person or switch genders as you see fit. Make this an opening to a longer work or a complete flash fiction.
Setting Prompt
Your story takes place in a sunny safe space. It might be just like the card at left — a small yard enclosed by a short wall. Tarot-lovers with another preferred deck can use that to inspire their setting prompt. Maybe it’s a larger space, in which your character rides a horse. Or you can disregard the image on the card and come up with your own sunny playground. Remember the meaning of The Sun, but go beyond the card itself to imagine this bright setting.
Maybe your setting is the sunroom on a spaceship. Maybe it’s the sunrise on a circle of stones protected by magic. Maybe it’s a family garden recalled from childhood in a prisoner’s memory. There are no limits to your fictional setting — make it the playground down your street or the only safe space in a post-apocalyptic world.
Consider the time and place. Contemporary? Historical? Otherworld? Is this Spring, Winter, or sweltering summer? Is the sun high in the sky or just about to set? Will the mood change when the sun goes down?
Close your eyes and picture whatever sunny safe space excites you. Visualize some details — what can you see, hear, smell and feel here? What mood permeates the scene? Who are the lucky characters in this space?
Now show this setting to your readers.
Planners can do a setting sketch — time and place, five senses, maybe a map, and notes on what might happen here.
Pantsers can write a paragraph or three, as the character steps close to the edge of the safety zone.
Genre Prompt
Try some sci-fi or cli-fi. (That’s climate fiction, sci-fi related to climate change.) I know it’s a leap from tarot into science but you’re creative, so no worries.
Begin with the sun — any sun, not necessarily the one we see every day — and go wherever its light takes you. Write a story where things are changing in the environment and your characters are coping, causing, or struggling with the consequences.
If you’re writing for sci-fi fans, you’ll have to get your facts and theories straight and come up with a premise that hinges on how things work in the real world — but with a blast of imaginative potential. Maybe your story takes place in another solar system, a critical time in some other planet’s orbit when it’s just close enough to the sun for something awesome to happen. Or maybe the sun in your story is just forming, or about to collapse. Maybe sunshine has been commodified in some new way in your fictional world. Or maybe sunshine is just a memory passed on in an elite underground complex.
If you prefer, you can skip the sci-fi and feature climate change in a horror story, a fantasy, or a comedy. (Because climate change is just hilarious.) Begin with a sun and take it anywhere.
Write an opening scene depicting a sun, add some characters, suggest some conflict, and see where you end up.
Happy writing!
Images on this page are by the following artists: Banner, left to right: Marseilles deck engraved by Nicolas Conver; Dragon Tarot illustrated by Roger and Linda Garland (also shown in the box below); Tarot Balbi by Domenico Balbi; Gilded Tarot by Ciro Marchetti; Radiant Rider-Waite deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith; Druid Craft deck illustrated by Will Worthington.
Catherine Austen 