By Anne Pisacano

When I met Lori Henriksen, award-winning author of The Winter Loon, at the WFWA Writer's retreat in September this year, she had mentioned that she was using tarot cards as a plot development tool for her current work-in-progress. I felt her fascinating story might be of interest to share. I contacted her, and she agreed to visit with me about her process.

How did this unusual idea first come to you?

Lori: When I attended the Golden Crown Literary Society writing conference, where my book was a finalist in two categories, one of the fascinating breakout workshops was led by Kimberly Cooper Griffin and Aurora Rey on Character Development.

During the workshop we broke into groups of two and were asked to analyze our character(s) using Tarot cards. They provided each group a deck of tarot cards, and the corresponding booklet that explained the imagery and symbolism. My partner and I were vaguely familiar with Tarot, but really not, in any sense, very knowledgeable.

We did a three-card spread:

First Card

• Mind
• Physical State
• Subconscious
  • Option 1
    • What I think

Second Card

• Body
• Emotional State
• Conscious
  • Option 2
    • What I feel

Third Card

• Spirit
• Spiritual State
• Super consciousness
  • Option 3
    • What I do

How do you use your tarot cards in your own process?

Lori : I did a three-card spread reading for my main character, Lucy.

My process is, first, setting a sacred space as I would for meditation.

I shuffle the cards, cut them three times, and chose three cards. Along with the information from the Tattoo Tarot booklet, and a book called  Tarot Reversals—which has great explanation of symbolism—I also trusted my intuition to do the reading, just as though I knew what I was doing.

Three notes I have from the workshop:

• You’re learning what is already in your head
• The cards tell you something you need to know—that you already know
• You are tapping into your insight/your gut feelings

How are they affecting your writing?

Lori : I feel I have insight into my characters’ psyche and also have a tool that if I’m stuck, e.g. wondering now what would Lucy do in this situation, I can pick a card and do a quick reading, or if it’s a major block, I can do another reading. It’s a learning process to develop my intuition.

Here is my three-card spread with my interpretation for my main character, Lucy.

First card. Mind – What she thinks

Three of Swords: Mental stress is too much to bear. A heart pierced by 3 swords suggests jealousy, heartbreak and rupture. Threes respond to creativity and integration, but swords bring disharmony and sorrow.

This card brought these questions about her main character to mind for Lori:

• Does her heart want something her mind says she cannot have?
• Is there a love triangle, failed affair, or separation?
• The pain of loss and betrayal hits hard, a sword through the heart.
• Is she blinded by the pain of her heartache?
• A flower blooms in front of her pierced heart and a flame burns above, reminding us pain is temporary.
• Her situation is fragile and so are the people around her.

Second card. Body – What she feels

Major Arcana – The Moon: Mysterious and not always what it seems. Has the power to pull the tides or illuminate the forest to show monsters that may not exist.

The second card allowed these questions and thoughts to be considered:

• What fears and illusions beset her on her journey to unknown landscapes?
• What delusions, deeply submerged fears or even terror are calling her survival instincts?
• Something is at the edge of her consciousness that she can't quite grasp.
• She may find herself swamped by emotions, misunderstandings, and secrets.
• She feels herself drawn toward some undefined purpose.
• Like the crayfish on the card, she may be cleansing the waters of unconscious habits by digesting debris from her past, and walking bravely between the needs of instinct and the domestication that dogs her.
• Hard to tell fact from fiction when the moon lights your path.

Third card.  Spirit –What she does

Seven of Wands - Seven reminds her to stand tall and fight for what she wants, holding her ground and prevailing over the odds.

Here are the questions that came to mind from the interpretation of this card.

• What obstacles will test her mettle?
• Can she stand up to the passion of her heart in the face of adversity?
• Be careful of unsure footing.
• Don't give up in light of confrontation.
• She must protect her passions.

Helpful resources

Tarot Card Meanings

Artist and creator of Lori’s Tarot Deck: Lana Zellner of Eight Coins

Thanks so much for sharing your interesting muse with us, Lori! Your story about tarot cards is as enchanting as I thought it would be.

What do you think?
Would you try tarot to learn more about your characters?

About Anne

Originally from New York,Anne Pisacano has lived in northern Arizona for over 20 years. From the city to the country, sidewalks to mountains, concrete to bare earth, night lights to starlight—she misses the beaches and her friends, but after more than two decades she now considers Arizona home. When not reading or reviewing other people’s books, Anne can be found editing a novel she’s co-written and plotting out her next book. Anne Pisacano writes contemporary Women’s Fiction with humorous, and strong romantic elements, because life is just too short to take it all so seriously. Oh, and she likes to add a touch of magic too. She is a grateful member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.

You can learn more about Anne on her at http://annepisacano.com, or she loves to connect on Facebook  or Twitter.

Barbara Probst

You’ve made your manuscript as good as you possibly can—for now. Everyone has advised you to take a break, let the book rest, so you can return to it with fresh eyes. Perhaps you’ve sent it off to a beta reader or developmental editor, hoping they’ll see the flaws and holes that you can’t and will show you how to bring your story to the next level. You know you have to avoid the temptation to keep tinkering with the manuscript while you await the very feedback you’ve requested—yet you can’t bear to do nothing.

The good news is that there are ways to work with your novel, rather than working on it—that is, without opening the Word document where it lives and awaits your return. Working with your book can help to loosen, deepen, shake up, and inject new energy your story while you prepare to work on it again.

Note: These exercises assume that you have an overview of your manuscript at your fingertips—a scene-by-scene summary that you can refer to. A good thing to have, for many reasons!

Write stuff you never intend to use.

• Focus on secondary characters, especially their backstories. What kind of house did Jane live in, as a child? What were her favorite toys? What did she dress up as for Halloween? What’s her recurring dream? What’s inside that box in the corner of her closet? What is something she lost and tried to find but couldn’t?
• Write a key scene from a different character’s point of view.
• Pick an emotional turning point or dramatic scene and give it a different ending.
• Interview your protagonist. Ask her the very questions she really doesn’t want to answer. Make her squirm. What lie might she tell you, to get out of answering?

Draw. Make maps and diagrams.

• Identify five core scenes. Think of them as mountain peaks. What are the steps up the mountain (prior scenes that make this core scene inevitable)? What are the steps on the descent (consequences that also prepare for the next peak)? Map this out on a timeline. You can vary the distance between steps, depending on how much chronological time passes between them or how much narrative space (word or page count) each occupies.
• Make a grid. Divide the left or vertical axis into scenes.  Across the top or horizontal axis, write the names of the major characters. That will give you a grid composed of boxes or "cells."  Mark where each character appears—that is, go down the column for Jane Smith and mark all the scenes that Jane is in. Then look at the frequency and position of her appearances. Are there big gaps? Does she need a tiny appearance in-between so we don’t forget about her, perhaps in another character’s conversation or interior monologue? Can she serve an additional role at a different point in the story? Do this for each character. Do certain characters always (or never) appear together? Try switching some of them around. How does that affect the tension and pace of the story?
• Do a similar grid, replacing characters with settings. Where do scenes take place? Can any of the settings be changed from a boring or over-used location (e.g., around the dinner table) to a place that’s more evocative? If a lot of scenes take place in someone's office, for example, is there a way to make the setting do more work for the story by highlighting specific elements that vary during these scenes? If your character’s boss always has fresh flowers on her desk, what do the flowers look like, at different moods or points in the story?

Do super-summaries.

• Write an epigram, slogan, or bumper sticker to capture the essential message of each scene. Do a lot of scenes have the same slogan? If so, think about variations on that message or its opposite. What small changes in some of the scenes could give them a different slogan?
• Focus on upward and downward motion, not on specific content. Tag your scene beginnings and endings with a plus or a minus, a “chute” or a “ladder.” Up if the protagonist is closer to her goal and down if she’s farther away. If a scene starts with a plus (hope, luck, an opportunity, an unexpected opening, etc.), then it ought to end with a minus (disappointment, failure, barrier, fear, doubt, betrayal, etc.), and vice versa. If you discover a string of plus-to-minus scenes, switch some of them around.

Avoid the temptation to open the Word document and start changing words, sentences, and scenes.  That’s tinkering with the old, the already-known. These exercises are designed to push you into the not-yet-known—to help you re-vision your book, not simply revise it.  

If you do these exercises (or others that you invent), when you do return to the manuscript, you’ll have turned the soil so something truly new can sprout.  

Anyone out there waiting? Will you try one of these? Any other suggestions?

About Barbara

Barbara Linn Probst, author of the groundbreaking book on nurturing out-of-the-box children, When the Labels Don’t Fit, is a writer, researcher, and clinician living on a historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. She holds a PhD in clinical social work and is a frequent guest essayist on major online writing sites. Her debut novel More Than She Knew will be issued by She Writes Press in Spring 2020. To learn more about Barbara’s work, please see http://www.barbaralinnprobst.com/

Julie Glover

Last month, I posted a break down the basics of WordPress's new update, fueled by software labeled Gutenberg. This month, I'm exploring formatting options, and next month I'll give you a few hacks and plugins you might want to use.

Again the new format is laid out in blocks, which are simply boxes that can hold text, images, links, or combinations. The default box is a paragraph, but you can choose other options by clicking on the plus-sign toward the top left corner of your screen or the change block type option on the block menu itself. We covered text and images last time, but you have a lot of formatting options available and ways to customize them.

Text Color

For every formatting option below, the right-hand sidebar gives you the opportunity to change the text color or the color behind text. So just assume going forward that you have that feature. However, you cannot select just a little bit of text and color that. Rather, selecting a color will change the color of all text within a block.

Here's an example of what happens if I select blue Inline Text Colour (yes, WP uses British spelling) for a paragraph block.

If I choose the Inline Background Colour, this is the result.

For Writers in the Storm, we disliked being unable to select text within a sentence and change its color. Particularly since this is a primary feature of Laura Drake's fabulous first page critiques! So we installed a plugin that allows us to choose different colors within a block. The one we used is called Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg.

Now on to specific formatting choices.

Headings

If you select Heading for your block, you'll get larger text for subtitles. But within Heading, your choices range from H1 through H6. Some of those choices show up in the block menu, but once you click the block you can see more heading sizes in the right sidebar.

Additionally, you can align the text left, right, or center. Here are the heading options, all left-justified:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Of course, what they look like on your website depends on the template and fonts you're using, but you can at least get a notion of the differences among the heading sizes.

Quote

You can use Quote to emphasize text.

This is a regular-sized quote.

This line at the bottom is for a citation.

But you can alter the quote default as well on that right sidebar after you've chosen the Quote option.

This is a large-sized quote.

And the bottom line again for a citation.

Lists

Of course, we still have lists, which we bloggers often enjoy using.

• Once you change the block to List, you don't have many options on the right sidebar.
  • But you can indent...
• Or outdent a list item.

1. And you can make it a numbered list as well
2. All these options being available in the block menu itself
3. Which you can get to simply by clicking anywhere within the block

Pullquote

A Pullquote provides even more emphasis. You see this a lot in nonfiction books, where some point the author wants to stress gets "pulled out" from the regular text and featured on its own. Again, you have two choices in the right-hand sidebar.

Click on Styles, and you'll see Regular like this one.

With this citation line.

Or you can go for a more colorful look with a Main Color background of your choice.

Citation line still included.

Verse

Verse is another option.
Now when I chose Verse, the text in the editor
May look the same as a paragraph.
But if you keep typing, you'll see that it's not.
The wrap-text function doesn't work
Because Verse is intended for exactly that—
Writing in verse, or poetry.
Because of that, Verse does not advance to a new block
When you press the Return key.
It merely goes to the next line.
If you want a new block, you have to move the cursor down
And add a new block below the current one.

Cover

Let's say you want to add a picture with a text overlay within a blog post. This could be for a title or another way to create a pullout quote. You can choose Cover formatting, upload a photo, and change the text on top. Not only that, but you can filter the photo, provide a color overlay, change the text color.

Cover doesn't give a ton of photo options, but it's a much quicker way to grab a picture, add text, and make a few changes than heading over to PicMonkey, Canva, or your PhotoShop software and fiddling around.

Table

This feature simply allows you to easily create a table within a post. Once you click on Table, you'll be asked how many columns and rows you want:

Blog Mistress	Month	Year
Fae	December	2018
Julie	January	2019
Laura	February	2019

But there are four rows, you say! Yes, because I added one. Once in a Table block, the block menu provides an Edit Table icon. Clicking that gives you options to add to and delete from your table.

In the right sidebar are the usual color options, but if you scroll down you'll see an option to have fixed width cells. If you don't choose that, the widths of columns will vary as you type in them, just as mine did above.

Embeds

One last option I want to cover is embedding. If you click on the circled plus-sign at the top right corner, and scroll down to Embeds, you'll see a whole bunch of choices. You can now embed something directly from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Hulu, Scribd, Slideshare, and more.

Let's say I want to embed a tweet from WITS's Jenny Hansen. I select Embed, Twitter, and enter the tweet's URL and voila!

https://twitter.com/JennyHansenCA/status/1075360558067666944

That was easy-peasy! But admittedly, I tried the same trick with Facebook several times over and couldn't get the embed to work. (I blame Facebook... for pretty much everything.)

Meanwhile, YouTube and TED Talks work just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfaFT1_SF6k

https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius

I didn't try all of the embeds, but you can! There's even an option for Kickstarter, if you have a fundraiser you're wanting to promote through your website.

As you can see, some changes to WordPress require extra navigation, either to find things which are now in different places or because there are some glitches (text color, for instance). But there are also some really great additions here with all the formatting choices. We authors can choose and use what works for us!

What other questions do you have about the new WordPress format? Or how can we talk you off the ledge?

About Julie

Julie Glover would far prefer to write books and leave the technology questions to her computer-savvy sons. But necessity is the mother of frustration despair invention.

When not wrangling with software, Julie writes mysteries and young adult fiction. Her YA contemporary novel, SHARING HUNTER, finaled in the 2015 RWA® Golden Heart®. She is represented by Louise Fury of The Bent Agency.

You can visit her website here and also follow her on Twitter and Facebook.