This is a continuation of yesterday’s essay on tarot, so please start there if you missed it!
Today, we’re diving back in with the similarities between an intuitive tarot approach and fiction writing (soon to be tied in with wounded family systems).
As I near the end of writing book one (nearly three years in the making) of my romantasy series, I’m continuing to learn how to support my creative process rather than adhering to rigid rules that derail me before I even begin.
While I could list a staggering number of these ill-fitting rules (seriously, I had an entire storehouse, with likely more to uncover!), we’ll focus on the Rule to Rule Them All:
Everything has to be executed perfectly, right from the start, otherwise it’s not worth doing.
(Subrule: Perfection entails being maximally comprehensive—more on that below.)
😒 Already, you can probably see how garbage this rule is, but let me show you how it was curtailing my writing.
As it turns out, writing fiction is soooo different from writing nonfiction (for my brain, anyway), and one piece that continually tripped me up for the first, oh, two years, was the notion that I had to know ALL THE THINGS (every minute detail of worldbuilding, character, plot, etc.) in order to finish a book. 😵💫 This is the maximally comprehensive subrule in action.
Now, might a book be even better if I did know all of those things? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The fact remains that I can’t, and I’d have to postpone the release of my book until the apocalypse if I insist on attaining this.
After much trial and error, what’s working for me is outlining the book I’m currently working on and continuing to flesh out the overall series outline as I go.
Here’s how this relates to tarot:
When I do this, my outline serves as a framework for my near-constant tsunami of ideas, much as the card’s image (and the divination question) serves as the framework for the intuitive fire hose during a tarot reading.
Without that framework, I have nowhere to hang my ideas as they pour in, and things rapidly reach the point of overwhelm. Similarly, without the frame of the tarot card, our intuitive insights can feel scattered, and it can be tricky to translate them into actionable guidance.
Beyond a certain point, though, I can’t force the framework to take shape faster than it is, so there’s always a lag between the flow of ideas and knowing what I’ll do with them. And because the framework is continually evolving, I can pretty much guarantee that when I publish book one in the spring, there will be a million things I wish I’d known so I could have snuck them in there, but…oh well! Save it for the next book, right?
Going back to the family rule:
Everything has to be executed perfectly, right from the start, otherwise it’s not worth doing. (Subrule: Perfection entails being maximally comprehensive.)
I can’t honor my ever-evolving framework while following this rule.
And really, I couldn’t write my series at all while following this rule, because in order to do it “perfectly” (impossible) and be “maximally comprehensive,” the entire framework would need to be locked in before I break ground on page one, book one, otherwise I might “fuck it up.”
Should I choose to follow that rule, my project will eventually be drained of life, which, in turn, will zap any motivation to work on it. In hindsight, so many of my creative projects ended up in the mental desk drawer, a victim of this rule. Perfectionism sucked the life right out of them, and once I no longer had a personal, authentic connection to the work, I couldn’t flog myself into doing it anymore. 😮💨
In rules-bound relationships, the calcification of shoulds and should nots leaves precious little room for actual, lived experience. For instance, if “good people” are always there for family, no matter what, what happens if you need time to yourself—or in my case, you need to exit the relationships entirely?
Going back to the More Than Two quote from yesterday, “This framework places a high price—being a moral failure—on any person who finds the rules too confining, forgets one, makes an error in judgment or otherwise doesn’t follow the system.”
Something that doesn’t get talked about often (I first encountered this idea in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, an excellent book) is how boring these relationships can feel (not to mention painful and angering).
For years, I felt intensely guilty for feeling so bored by some of my family connections. In truth, there was very little authentic connection available, such that we were both essentially reading off a script, a very well-worn script that didn’t allow for spontaneous or evolving expression.
The parallels with soul-sucking writing projects and lackluster tarot readings are clear.
If we try to avoid risk and discomfort through rigid rules, eventually life has no room to exist.
What if your unique ways of thriving aren’t aligned with the rules you grew up with—what do you do? Do you try to browbeat yourself into submission, for fear of being a “bad person,” or do you cultivate the courage to forge your own path?
If you choose the latter, you’re embarking on what Jung called individuation.
While it’s certainly not the easiest path, what it offers encapsulates why I practice magic: to remember and experience the Mystery in the mundane.
When I’m living according to a script, either things happen the way I expect them to, or they don’t and I’m disappointed, followed by, to a greater or lesser degree, resisting what is. There’s little room for curiosity and synchronicity. What happens is either good (on script) or bad (off script).
The path of individuation asks us to explore our beliefs—beliefs about who we are, who others are, what the world is like, “good” and “bad,” and so on—risking illusory certainty for a present-moment connection with the world, both inner and outer.
This shit is hard! But it’s also life. It’s a commitment to honoring that living beings (and systems) change and grow, rather than insisting they stay the same so we can be comfortable.
Fear can cause us to retreat into rigidity and rules. We strike the Faustian bargain of sacrificing authenticity in exchange for so-called safety, only to find out that, without a connection to the Self, we can never feel safe, no matter how many rules we pile on ourselves and others.
So, whether in tarot, writing, or relationships, how can you support yourself from the inside-out, so you feel grounded enough to stay curious? Grounded enough to carve out space for alternative ways of knowing and being, rather than reaching for “how things are done”?
It’s not easy being human, but it’s infinitely harder when we’re not allowed to be who we are.
Here’s to the journey, my magical friend. 💖
