GreenFlame, I sorta like your idea.I'm with Griz, though about not perpetuating stereotypes, and what TarotBear said, too. Fiction or not, people get an idea about something and it just grows from there. We should do our best not to show ourselves as something unsavory to the masses. Good luck with your story
Have you written something as complicated as a novel before? Successfully submitted fictional material to an editor for consideration for publication? Or are you doing a personal project, perhaps a self-published e-book?
Writing is hard. Writing well is very hard. Writing something that will get published is stupid hard and writing what people will enjoy reading enough to pay you for it is beyond the skills of most humans.
Tarot as a primary vehicle or backstory plot mechanism has been done hundreds of times but it's only been done well a few times. Find those few books and learn from their authors.
True dat! ALL of that. Writing is much harder than people think, but GreenFlame is young, he has to start somewhere.
Just my opinion, the best tarot tropes are never (or only superficially) supernatural. Stooping to spirits or inexplicable or hidden forces is a tyro's copout.
Gotta disagree to a point here. People who see, sense, and hear spirits can write about this stuff and it isn't a copout. It isn't really always considered "super natural", but rather a very natural thing to have the presence of spirit around. Magic Realism is the closest I can come to defining the genre?
Threading tarot into a well crafted story is a monumental challenge but no more so than having a main character make their living as a photographer or an actor. To write convincing characters, the author must know something about their skills.
Yep.
Nice! Care to share how you use it for structuring (as opposed to plot)? I've often wondered about using Tarot to do the same thing but wasn't sure how to approach it.
I think Corinne Kenner's book "Tarot for Writers" touches on this?