Tarot for Storytelling Lesson 2 workshop
Three cards, three beats Tarot on the surface
Draw three cards from your deck without looking anything up. Lay them in a row. Write a three-sentence story in which each card represents one beat: beginning, middle, end.
Use only what you can see in the images. Don’t interpret; describe. Let the description become story.
Your writing saves as you type, privately, in this browser.
Lay out your three cards
Draw three from your own deck, then find each one here. Your deck may look different from these; write what you see in yours. Or let this deck draw for you.
Describe, don’t interpret
Who is in the image? What are they doing? What time of day does it look like? What’s the emotional weather of the scene?
Your three-sentence story
About this workshop
A free workshop from Lesson 2 of Tarot for Storytelling, Will Cady’s video course on reading tarot cards as the elements stories are made of. It turns any three cards into a three-sentence story, using only what you can see in the images, so it works with any deck and with no experience of tarot.
“Before we go into the architecture of tarot, before we talk about planets and archetypes and the hidden blueprint underneath the whole system, I want you to just look at the cards. The way you'd look at a painting in a museum before reading the placard. Let them be what they are, visually, before you know what they mean.”
“The first lesson of tarot for storytelling is that tarot’s images were built to be read by looking. That was the design. If you go to the booklet first, you'll learn what someone else saw before you find out what you see.”
“Your instinctive response to the image can’t be wrong. It is rich with meaning that has equal significance to the official interpretation. It is data. It is your unconscious speaking in the language of symbol, which is its primary tongue.”
Will Cady, from Lesson 2 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.