Tarot for Storytelling Lesson 4 workshop, part two
The royal family Cast your characters
The sixteen court cards are sixteen base human archetypes. Each one meets two elements: the element of its rank and the element of its suit.
Choose three cards that feel like characters in a story you want to tell, or one you are telling now. Cast one as the protagonist, one as the antagonist and one in a supporting role, then write who each one is.
Your writing saves as you type, privately, in this browser.
The elemental grid
Tap a card to meet it. Each rank and each suit carries an element, so every card is one element expressed through another.
Your cast
Give each character a name and the details that make them theirs. Then write who they are, what they want, and the element they need more of to become whole.
The elements in your cast
Every character holds two elements. Here is what your three hold together, and what you said each one needs.
About this workshop
A free workshop from Lesson 4 of Tarot for Storytelling, Will Cady’s video course on reading tarot cards as the elements stories are made of. It uses the sixteen court cards, each one element expressed through another, to cast and write the characters of a story.
“These are 16 base human archetypes. Many characters from the stories you've loved are some combination of these 16. It’s basically math, like a genetic code of character generation.”
“If you lay the 16 court cards out in a 4×4 grid (suits across the top, royal ranks down the side) you’ve drawn a matrix for human character generation. And any point on that grid tells you something specific about a character's energetic signature.”
Will Cady, from Lesson 4 of Tarot for Storytelling
Keep your pages
Your work stays in this browser until you clear it. To keep it anywhere else, save a copy. Later workshops return to what you write here.
A free workshop from Tarot for Storytelling
Ten video lessons with Will Cady, a workshop after each one, and the maps behind the deck. Founding price $111 for the first students.
Hear when enrollment opensCard art by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite deck, 1909, in the public domain.