Teneice Durrant, creator of Tarot with Ten, uses various tarot and oracle decks to provide monthly readings for writers, with exercises on using imagery and intuition as prompts. August’s prompt is about using the Strength card to develop an internal battle or learning opportunity for your character.
Using the Strength card to develop an internal battle or learning opportunity for your character
Watch and listen to Teneice's tarot reading for writers or read the transcript of the reading below.
Hi everyone, welcome to On Deck. My name is Teneice, and we are currently moving through the Major Arcana and comparing the hero cycle in the Major Arcana with the hero cycle in a narrative arc and kind of figuring out how we can use the Major Arcana of the tarot to help us write our story. So this month, we are talking about the Strength card.
Now this deck is in French, this is a traditional Rider-Waite-Smith iconography, the pictures, but I did pick this deck up in France over the summer, in Paris, so I thought I'd show it off a little bit. But this Strength card is a Leo card, so it's possible that if you're using this for your story that your main character embodies some Leo traits in terms of being a leader, being outgoing, these are kind of traditional Leo characteristics—maybe, on the flip side, a little self-centered, very outgoing, likes to be the center of attention. So those are kind of stereotypical traditional characteristics of a Leo. The Strength card here means that it's a representation of how we're always kind of battling our inner, I don't want to say animal, but like our inner nature, our ego, our baser instincts, the instincts to just kind of react and charge.
This woman here has subdued this lion with gentleness and grace and not by force, so it's kind of the idea that you can't force yourself to change something or act in a different way, or you can't force other people to do things that are against their nature, but if you use compassion and grace and gentleness, you can kind of subdue it and help it move in the best path, right? So this is kind of like our internal, maybe our internal wounds, our childhood, whatever makes us want to kind of pounce and react and roar and fight. If we approach ourselves with kindness and, you know, recognition of the desire to jump forward and move and be active and attack something, we will actually be able to channel that energy into something positive and constructive instead of running around trashing everything that we find.
So how does this work in your story? This could be part of the narrative arc where we're building up to the false win or the false defeat.
If you have ever taken a look at, you know, like the Save the Cat beat sheet, it’s very similar to the hero's journey in that, you know, once you have kind of found your mentor, you've got your sidekick or your friend, you have done some kind of realization about yourself—and I'm talking about, you know, the main character—then you have kind of a series of ups and downs that will test those skills, and then you'll relearn or you'll readjust or, you know, it's just kind of all on the way to developing the skills, the emotional capacity, the mental capacity to confront the thing that needs to be confronted and come out of it a changed person, right? Because the narrative arc is all about the character evolution, like how does the character change based on the circumstances that they have been introduced to. So the Strength card here represents a scene or a plot point where the main character is kind of being pushed up against some internal need to fight or to charge or to roar or to kind of let their base or animal, you know, their ego direct their actions. And there is this force either modeled externally so that the main character can see it and model it, right, or it's kind of something that they struggle with internally, and there's a period of reflection and those kind of things. So that's where kind of we see this Strength card come out in this narrative arc is that, you know, this inner negotiation is just as important as the physical development of the character through these kinds of ups and downs.
All right, so since we have that idea, let's pull a few cards and see if we can't come up with maybe a scene or like a little writing prompt to see, you know, how we can incorporate this into our story or maybe we get an idea for a story based on this. Let's see. There we go.
Let's see what we've got. Okay, we'll take those even though that's quite a few. Okay, so the first cards that came out, just remember this Strength card. I'm going to move her off to the side for a minute.
The Knight of Pentacles and the Hermit
Now, the Knight of Pentacles, you know, represents the knight that is slow and steady. It is a long-term investment. It's reliable. It yields results. So there's something here that our main character, you know, the goal is to be like a stable, long-term, steady resource that can be drawn on, or this is kind of just the path that they're on right now, kind of the slow and steady, you know, using your resources wisely, planning for the future, planting crops, trying to set your future self up for success.
The Hermit is the teacher, right? And a lot of times people will think, oh, the Hermit means, you know, to go into your cave and do some reflecting and learn yourself and study and it's like an internal journey. But that's not entirely how the original writers were discussing the Hermit. And Tarot is intuitive. You don't have to read it in any way, you know, based on the definitions that were originally prescribed to each of these, you know. It's all made up, so you can do what you want. But the feeling that resonated the most with me and with this Hermit is that the Hermit is full of knowledge, is full of wisdom, has experienced a lot, has a lot to share, but he's not hiding. He's not in his cave. He's not secluded. He is on the top of this mountain or this hill, and he does have the star in his lantern.
Now, I don't know if we've had the star before or if you've heard me talk about the star, but the star is like a wish come true, right? And it's healing. But it's also, if you think about how we used to navigate, how we used to sail or chart courses, know which direction we were going—we used the stars to guide us. So the star in this situation is also like the thing that guides you towards what you want.
So you have to kind of look at the situation, like, is this thing going to get me to where I ultimately want to go? And if not, we change direction. If it is, we keep going towards that thing. So the Hermit is standing there at the top of this hill and he's looking out and he's saying, look, I have this healing. I have this wish that you want, but you have to come here to get it. I've climbed up here. I am a light. I am a beacon. I'm trying to show you which way to go. But if you don't come towards me, I cannot give you this knowledge. I cannot give you this, you know, guidance going forward. Okay.
So it looks like our character here, part of the story is that, you know, they want to slow and steady wins the race. They want to, you know, they don't want to rush into things. They don't want to take too many risks, but they have to decide that this star is what they want and that they're willing to climb this mountain to get the knowledge that they need.
Two of Wands
The next card here is the Two of Wands, and the Two of Wands represents this idea of like, well, I hurried up and I accomplished this goal and, you know, I sacrificed a lot of stuff, but I said I was going to do whatever I wanted to do to get to the top. And I did it. And I'm standing here at the top going, is this all there is, like, is this all life has to offer? And he sees that there's a whole wide world out there, that he has opportunities, like holding the world in his hand, he has the opportunity to explore the whole world. And he had just been so limited on, you know, achieving this one goal, no matter what, that it was kind of consuming him, and he gets to the top and he realizes that there's so much more out there besides this one goal.
So we can see here, the challenge with our character is that they seem very focused. They're not in a hurry. So that's a little bit different than this guy here, but it's kind of like riding a horse with blinders on. They need the education and the guidance that the hermit provides.
And they need to realize that what will really fulfill them is a broader landscape, is to understand that there's way more out there than this narrow focus that they have. Okay.
King of Cups
And the King of Cups here, finally, the King of Cups to me is always like the therapist or the guidance counselor who it doesn't have to be a man, a male character, who is completely in control of his emotions. Not that he doesn't let himself feel, but he has let himself feel everything. And he's mature enough and he has worked through all of, you know, his triggers and the way he feels things. And he knows, you know, how he's going to react in all of these situations, and he honors the feelings that he has, but he doesn't let them drown him. You can see in front of him, the water's wavy, like he's surrounded by wavy water, waves and stuff, but he's calm. He's still, because he knows himself, he knows his emotions. He knows what it is that's going to, you know, make him feel certain things and he's okay with expression, expressing his entire humanity.
A writing exercise
Okay. So coming back to the Strength card, it looks like the strength that our character is going to need for this situation is, you know, the strength to kind of combat that internal feeling of not taking risks, of, you know, staying on this straight and narrow path and not taking the opportunities to follow their guidance, you know, their wishes, to get the true knowledge that they need. They may think that, you know, the way forward is very logical and practical and strategic, right? It's all money. It's all accounting. It's adding zeros and subtracting. But what they find is that the real knowledge that they need is more of a creative with the wants and a more emotional intelligence, a more emotional experience in education.
Okay. That was a long one this month. Thank you guys so much for joining me. If you haven't seen any of the other On Decks, please take a look at those.
We are going to go through the whole Major Arcana and talk about how we can use each of these cards to help us write and do a little bit, you know, do these little writing prompts to kind of help us get through the story that we're writing or create a new story, get some ideas going.
All right, thank you guys so much for joining me. and I'll talk to you next month.
What did you think of this tarot reading and the cards as visual prompts for story development? Share with us in the comments, and contact us if you’re interested in working one-on-one with Teneice in part 3 of Writing Toward Balance and Wholeness: Tarot and the Narrative Arc (taking parts 1 and 2 first is not required).
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