Episode 40: Tarot Story Part 2

In this week’s episode, Crys and JP catch up on how their Tarot stories are coming along. They also talk about some other tools and techniques they use to help form their stories.

Show Notes

The Nutshell Technique by Jill Chamberlain

Pixar Pitch

Three Story Method: Foundations of Fiction by J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon

The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi

You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story by Howard Houston

Transcript

Crys: Hello, friends. This is episode 40 of the Write Away Podcast and it’s April 22 as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…

JP: JP Rindfleisch.

Crys: Oh, JP, how was your week? You were in weird Kansas of the underground curiosities.

JP: Pure madness. Okay. For the day job, I had to go to Kansas for three days and I just got back and… okay. I’m a terrible person, but all I really thought about for Kansas was Wizard of Oz and very flat land. I figured it was just like Illinois extra. Because basically I viewed all of Midwest except for Wisconsin as just flat. But apparently Kansas is secretly well known for their underground caves, which is just common.

The facility I worked at apparently had an underground cave tunnel that drove to their warehouse. And then I learned about a place called SubTropolis, which is an “underground city” of four different warehousing units. And like they have roads. They have, I can’t even, my brain just exploded when they’re like, oh yeah, we just have a place called SubTropolis.

I’m like, that is not real.

Crys: When can we set up tours for writers?

JP: Right?

Crys: But they’re like, but it’s just warehouses. We’re like, we don’t care. We need to see it. We need to know how to write this.

JP: So cool. Look it up. SubTropolis. And they have pictures. It’s cool. Definitely something you could make for fantasy world, but other than that, for writing wise, it was good.

I was able to meet most of my days for revisions. I’m so close to the end. And I got the cover design back for book three. We went through only two edits. But man, our cover designer’s so good. So I’m super happy. How was your week?

Crys: I had a revelation Tuesday, cause I have been feeling very negative about my productivity and what I’m able to get done and just feeling very low energy.

And then Tuesday, I was up early, it was one of those mornings where I don’t have the kiddo and I, for some reason or another, I woke up at 3:30am and I started work by I don’t know, 4:30. By 9:00. I had completed edits on two podcasts, the transcriptions, edits, all that, and I had written 2100 words and I was sitting there bitching, in my head, that I’d got nothing done when I could literally see when I wrote it out before me, that’s a pile of work.

And I realized the problem is that my goblin brain had taken over once again. And I had stopped recording my done list, my “I done it” list, which is the same as a to-do list, but the important part is the “I done it” part. And if you’ve done something that wasn’t on your to-do list, you put it on there and then you mark it off, and it puts less pressure on the doing and more pressure on the recognizing that you had done it.

So I instituted that again on Tuesday, that went really well. Yesterday went really well. I was just far more able to judge my productivity level in an accurate manner when I can actually see, in a visual form, the tasks I’ve done versus my brain just looking back. Because my brain doesn’t remember what I did five minutes ago, let alone three hours ago, and be like you clearly have not done anything.

JP: Yeah. I definitely think for you, you got to have your done it list.

Crys: I got to have my done it list.

JP: Fantastic. Like you telling me what you did. I was like, come on, you did so many things.

Yeah, I’m in the same boat where I feel like all the things aren’t getting done, blah, blah, blah. But as long as I hit my morning schedule… I’m more time oriented. So I know that as long as I complete this chunk of time, I’m good because that’s just all I can offer at the moment.

But yeah, I definitely think you need your done-it list because when you list these things off I’m like, you did so much!

Crys: Done it lists back in the system. Yay. Oh. And then we actually did work on our Tarot stuff, which spoiler is going to be the episode, not that you didn’t see it in the title. But first, do we have comments.

JP: We do! From wonderful Lon who posted it today my time, at 3:33 in the morning. I’m presuming his time was 1:33 in the morning, which is a bit less late or early. I don’t really know. But it was on the episode for trauma. First comment in on it.

He finds it very easy to traumatize his characters, giving them past trauma and then doing something to trigger or worsen it, because he’s a monster– verified.

And he loves the blitz of giving his characters and a combo of both big and little trauma. Usually at least one bit one. One by one? One bit one?

Crys: Excellent. Bless you, monstrous Lon. I, yeah, it’s something I’m working on.

JP: Yeah. And it’s definitely a really good tool to have your character go through those emotions because more or less like the characters you write are the archetypes that people want to read to process through something.

Crys: Yeah.

JP: Yeah. Perfect.

Crys: All right. Now, how long has this taken us to get, a month, two months?

JP: It’s taken us a while, but for good reason.

Crys: Yeah, we got side tracked. Had we just been like, yeah, we’re going to write a Tarot episode or Tarot story, we would have been fine, but then we’re like, oh, let’s make it more interesting, as if it’s not interesting enough. We’ll do it and we’ll write villains.

And, I guess we need to do an episode on what are villains after this. Or antagonists, because I think villains are actually difficult for me to like, when I think of them as villains, I have a really hard time. Anyways, that’s part of that episode. We both outlines, we do not have stories yet, but we finally have outlines.

So do you want to go back over what your cards were for your 3Cs?

JP: Boy do I ever. Oh, I found them. I was just going to like, delay for a really long time talking. Alright. For my three cards, I had Judgment in reverse, which is all about being judgemental either by others or the person being judgmental to others, indecision, self doubt.

The Eight of Buttons, which is also the Eight of Pentacles in reverse. This includes things like no progress, but also perfectionists. So obviously if one is a perfectionist and always seeking to be at a hundred percent, they may not be making progress. They may be cutting corners or that feeling of having unfulfillment.

And then the last card I had is the special card to my deck The Beyond. And this is the soul, the higher self, seeking a higher meaning or power.

Crys: And then mine for conflict. I had the card Strength. I didn’t write down my meanings here. But Strength is pretty much what you would assume. Somebody at the top of their game, in their power.

My choice was Mother of Wands.

And this had a hint of sexuality. 

Then the consequence was the Three of Swords reversed, which had a sense of choices, particularly the wrong ones when in reversed. And I think there was a hint of betrayal. But I didn’t write those down in my notes.

So how did you translate your card to your conflict?

JP: So with conflict, if Judgment in reverse is the conflict with a lot of indecision, self-doubt, I turned that into a poor relationship between my main character and their father, their father being this very judgmental figure. And also being a narcissist too, which I looked up like what those traits would look like for a character.

As a side note, I also did a character wheel pull to figure out my character’s personality, which we can go over in a little bit, but that’s kinda what led me towards the whole narcissistic approach to it. But I brought in this character into a situation in which there was a lot of being judged by other people.

So that was how I brought it into conflict.

Crys: Yeah. So for me, I think that this didn’t apply specifically to what the conflict is, cause the conflict you can equal to the inciting incident. And so for me, I interpret it more as just what’s the setup of the scene.

So I have a character who’s in their strength. And in this case I chose to write about a mage who’s just reached journeyman level status, and she wants to celebrate with her girlfriend, and I think the actual conflict I have written down though is that her girlfriend’s not happy with this small celebration. She wants to do something big.

How about your choice?

JP: Okay, so for choice, Eight of Buttons, so no progress/perfectionist. So in my story, it’s a short story off of the TASM project that I’m working in, but it’s set in late 1700-ish in Scandinavian area. And there’s magic. Of course, why not?

And so the father figure is the perfectionist in this scenario, but he’s not making any progress in what he wants. He’s very slow and arduous to it. And so the choice I have is, this character who knew little about his past is discovering his father who is basically a mage. So that makes him a mage as well. And his father is doing something unseemly with the magic. Very evil, dead magic thing. And so his choice is to either take up that mantle or not. And that’s the choice where it led.

Crys: Mine was… so it was, but the Mother of Wands, it was for me when I was pulling these, it was really clear that the choice centered around a person and that person having some kind of sexual, romantic relationship with her.

So in this, my choice is she learns throughout the story , or realizes throughout the story that her girlfriend’s never just going to be satisfied with her accomplishments or who she is because she is a solid, responsible person. Her girlfriend is someone who’s always seeking excitement and terrified of the boredness of stability.

And so her choice is that she can either stay in the city, she would take a journeymanship in the city, the capital city, growing in the direction she wants with the girlfriend. But, knowing that she won’t be able to, because she loves this girl so much, she won’t be able to escape this negative cycle that she can already see happening.

Or she can leave, go somewhere she doesn’t really want to, because the teacher she wants to be with is here. But separate herself from the girlfriend and be free. So those are her choices.

Why am I always writing about relationships?

Anyways, how about your consequence?

JP: So for consequence, The Beyond, so the soul, higher being, belief.

This seems like it’s a positive card, but I’m turning it into a not so positive card. Because ultimately the story flows in which the character is going to take up the mantle of the father after killing them surprise twist. And it’s going to lead to separation with the partner they currently have. It’s also going to turn them into what their father was doing.

So he’s going to seek this higher self of being, but what it’s going to do is corrupt.

Crys: You had that upwards triumph feel to yours. Mine is a downwards, like, dammit. So my consequence is,  her girlfriend convinces her to accept a position in a more exciting city. But her mentor says some things that mirror her insecurities about the girlfriend.

So even though she’s accepted this new position because of her girlfriend, she then breaks up with her girlfriend. And her girlfriend is a noble’s daughter. And because of the girlfriend’s bitterness, the main character is now assigned to the butt crack of the world. Even though she’s one of their top students, they can’t fight against this noble’s power.

She not only is not where she wanted to be, not going to live the kind of freedom that she thought she was going to have, but she’s going to end up in Podunk nowhere, that the girlfriend thinks is just gonna stall her out and give her nothing.

But it does confirm to her that she made the right decision with the girlfriend at least, but she doubts all her other decisions that she made.

JP: That’s cool. I like how our endings are different in one sense, like yours, it almost seems like the consequence is like this external circumstance controlling. And mine is like the internal decision has impacted the external. I enjoyed the direction we both went.

Crys: Indeed.

So let’s talk about the other pulls that we did in building this story. Mine’s simple, so I’m gonna start so then you can have free reign.

After we pulled our conflict, choice, and consequence, I went to a different deck. And I pulled my characters. I knew I wanted a main character, and an antagonist, and then a third possible character.

I pulled the 10 of Wands as my main character. And the keywords I have for that are responsibility, overwhelmed, letting go of someone else’s expectations of you. So you can see pretty clearly how that informed my character for the story.

 Then the Four of Cups was the antagonist and these were the keywords: bored with stability, frustrated, complaining.

These I pulled almost directly, but then the third one where I was just like and a maybe other characters, the Ten of Pentacles and that’s spiritual and material abundance, building a legacy, chasing luxury and status is the negative side of it.

I didn’t realize until after I pulled in that mirror/mentor character that that actually applied because I was just going like, well, I don’t know what to do with that one, so I’m just not going to even think about it. But still it was sitting in the back of my brain and gave me that mentor character.

JP: Awesome.

Crys: Yeah. And then I was really… I needed confirmation for both of my characters. I knew that my main character wanted… they sat in a place of responsibility and stability and they were happy with that. And I knew that my Four of Cups, they just are so bored and want change all the time. And I wanted to know specifically, what more were their wants?

So I pulled a couple cards, and I did not write down what I pulled. So I don’t know. All I wrote down was the keywords that came out of that, that inform like the change and the responsibility. So the Ten of Wands is responsible and wants love. And the Four of Cups is changeable and wants excitement.  They just emphasized what those characters were like.

How about you, sir?

JP: I did do the people pull. But I will focus on the character wheel which is 10 cards. I remember our conversation last time in which that became confusing, but 10 cards, it’s a pull to ask some questions. I’ll go through, quickly, the questions. And then I have a little blurb that I put together as to a descriptor for this character.

So for who are they? I pulled the Wheel of Fortune in reverse. Some keywords for that is like bad luck and no control over life.

Who aren’t they? The Hanged Man in reverse. So someone who is not procrastinating, not a victim or a hypocrite.

Where they are from? The Ace of Pentacles. This is something that incites wealth, healthy life, etc.

Where they aren’t from? Page of Cups, not from love.

The good relationships they’ve had? The Ten of Swords in reverse. So a relationship that pulled them out of a terrible situation for a fresh start.

Bad relationships? The Five of Swords so something abusive more or less is a potential there. I didn’t write down the keywords for this one. I just interpreted it.

What they do let in? The Queen of Cups in reverse. So a lack of emotional boundaries or balance. What they don’t let in? The Devil. So they don’t let an attachments or commitments.

How they talk? The Tower. So questioning beliefs, something chaotic, emotional outbursts.

And how they don’t talk? The Fool in reverse.

So they don’t talk in a foolish or naive or reckless nature. So as my little blurb, I have…

This person feels like much of their life is out of their control. That expectation has been put on them likely from a wealthy upbringing. They take life into their own hands and separated themselves from the past life, but the emotional wounds from unloving parents stuck. They never commit to relationships, but they drown the others in gifts to keep them nearby. They never settle, always quick to cut loose those that don’t serve them. They are calculating, never reckless or close-minded, but always willing to debate.

That kind of gave me a character that wants to distance themselves from a wealthy family. But yet at the same time is so impacted by the way they grew up that they don’t know how to interact with everyone else.

Crys: And did you do this for your antagonist as well when you were setting things up or did you just let the main character inform what the antagonist needed to be?

JP: I had it inform what the antagonist needed to be. So I didn’t know what the, because… I knew there was gonna be like a bad guy, figured it was going to be like a father figure. And then this really incited what it would be because wealthy family, unloving family. Then I was peeking through The Emotional Wound Thesaurus and I found a grown-up by a narcissist and I figured that would be a great trait for a character that I need to do in a short. So that kind of incited.

Crys: Yeah. And I know you often do Pixar Pitches for your story. Did you happen to do one for this story?

JP: I did. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if it’s correct. Let me quick look at it.

Crys: Yeah.

JP: Did you do one?

Crys: I didn’t but I did do a Nutshell Technique sketch, which is another tool that I’ve learned recently, that works really well for me.

So how the Nutshell Technique works is that you have a few points. You say what your setting is, like what sets up the scene. What their setup want is the main character. What’s the point of no return. What’s the catch, the crisis, the choice and the final step.

And so these are the specific notes I had for this and I learned about this in a forum that I was in. And then I went to buy the book and realized I’d already bought the book and then completely forgot about it. As I do.

But your setup want: very clear. What is the thing that your character starts the story out wanting?

My character sets out wanting to celebrate with their girlfriend. From there, you figure out what your Crisis Point is because it’s going to be the point in which they want the exact opposite of what they started out wanting. And this generally comes in at about 70% in the story. And so I have.. I went a little specific.

She uses her new position to take the girlfriend somewhere fancy. But the girlfriend is bored and talks about all the new, exciting places she could be stationed. And she’s not happy that the main character wants to stay. At that point, my main character no longer wants to be celebrating with her girlfriend. She’s just done with it. The point of no return is the dinner with the girlfriend.

I don’t have notes about what that specifically is. It explains it a little differently in a way that better fits into my brain than most theories explain the point of no return. And that happens with the catch.

She’s having dinner with a girlfriend, the catch: but that’s not enough. The girlfriend wants something else, something new and shiny.

And then you come to your choice after the crisis. And that’s the choices that my MC does decide to take the new position, listening to her girlfriend.

But then the final step is that she breaks up with the girlfriend so she can be free.

And so that doesn’t cover the consequence of what happens after that. I find using the 3Cs and the Nutshell Technique really helped me like pick out all the pieces. Cause one of the problems for me, the strength of the 3Cs is that it’s so simple. I often need more points and I often need a bit more complex and smaller steps to break down what actually happens to a point where my brain can understand it. So I like using the 3Cs so that I know that my story is strong and it’s not getting distracted by all the other little points, but I like using all the little points to help me get to the point where I can see what my 3Cs are.

JP: Yeah. I was writing out my scenes and I did the 3Cs for each scene. And then I ended up adding a couple of lines for what people wanted in the scene. Because I find that knowing the intent of what the character wants from point A to point B, regardless of if they make it there or not, helps drive the 3Cs.

Crys: Absolutely.

JP: I don’t have a correct Pixar Pitch, but I can throw one out there if you would like.

Crys: Yeah.

JP: So Pixar Pitch, usually, for those that don’t know it’s… what is this? This is seven lines. And it goes:

Once upon a time, blah, blah, blah.

Every day, blah, blah, blah, one day, blah, blah, blah.

Because of that…

Then, because of that…

Until finally…

And ever since that day…

Since it’s a short, I gloss over the once upon a time and every day, but in those two sections this would be about a young scholar who lives distant from his father, lives with his mother every day.

 He’s a scholar. So he’s at the university. He is meeting a partner and having a relatively great life. One day his mother dies. And as per her wishes, he arrives at his distant narcissistic father’s home. And because of that, he discovers that his father is partaking in some type of mysterious, occultish ritual.

Because of that, he discovers that he has magic of his own. Until finally he faces his father and confronts him about what the ritual is, and ultimately has to make a decision between leaving, and leaving his father to do his own occultish rituals and hoping that his father never tracks him down, but by doing so he will ensure a future with his partner. Or killing his father and not knowing the consequences… to which he chooses the bad choice, which will result in him living alone and taking up the mantle of what his father was doing.

Crys: So one of the things I find really interesting is that yours is a clear, like bad guy choice. Not a bad guy, but bad guy choice.

Mine isn’t. For me to get the villain-y or rebel-y tint to it, it’ll be entirely in how I end like the character’s state of mind at the very end. And so if I am going to that villainous side, then there’s going to be thoughts and feelings of revenge. At the very end, I’m going to boss this tiny little Podunk place, I’m going to manage to get my way out of it, and then I’m going to take that family down. Or something. So.

JP: Yeah, this was the part that I struggled with was why would he make this choice? Because it like, to me, I know… there are some choices that we make that are never great. And I loved how Lovecraft Country did this because I had so many expectations for character to make the choice.

It was thrown out on the table and it was so obvious that they were supposed to make this choice, and then they made the other choice. To the point where that choice was selfish or it was viewed as selfish. It was viewed as like they had a responsibility over here, but yet they still went with this direction. And it was the way that they developed the character that once they made that choice, even though you recognize that it was the wrong choice, you were like, Oh, that, that actually makes sense.

And I see where they’re coming from and why they would have done this. So that’s the direction I want to take. I really like how you’re approaching it, where you’re making the heiress around the character, the villainry like their mental state. I think that’s another fun dichotomy or two directions that we’re taking to get a villain out of this.

Crys: Yeah. And mine’s definitely more, and we had said, like more villain origin story. I do think it’s just difficult for me to, what’s the word,  sympathetically write a villainous character without knowing how they got to where they are and exactly why they’re making these choices.

And, when we first started this, I was trying to write a character in a scifi series that my friend Tami and I have been working on for awhile. And the character that I was trying to make it for, I didn’t know a lot about them. And I’ve developed a lot about that character in this process, but I still felt like it didn’t fit the cards.

I have been plotting this new fantasy series that I intend to use for Kindle Vella, if the Vella terms turn out great, or just acceptable, they don’t have to be great. They have to be acceptable.

Regardless, I have this wonderful fantasy world that I’m really excited to write in. And I just was like, okay, what kind of character would exist in this world?

So I created a character that didn’t currently exist in my world, but now I, in my brain, have placed her in a town where she will absolutely run into my main character. And now she will probably be part of the story moving forward, both her and the heiress.

JP: Yeah. I kept mine to the TASM project, but my problem that I ran into was the magic system. I realized that I was too loosey goosey with my magic system, and I needed to get some defined terms down as to how it works because it was crucial to the choices that were made.

My character doesn’t end up in the novel for the TASM project, but is a descendant, or I guess the descendant, is in the TASM project.

So that was my hangup, was the magic system. And that’s why I was like, I need to pause and figure it out.

Crys: So it’s interesting that we’ve both written stories in worlds that we’ve already created. Has this been influenced by the You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story for you? Cause it definitely has for me.

JP: Yes and no. I’m trying to remember when we started this and how far I was in You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story, cause it’s not like I leave it to last minute. Except for this current one, I’m like halfway through it. It’s great.

Crys: That’s because it’s gay and it’s wonderful.

JP: And also I was traveling, so like I read so many books. It was a thing.

 I think that there was a piece of using this opportunity to explore a little bit more of the story and clearly I needed it because as I started thinking about it, I’m like, wait a minute, I need to answer these questions for my current project and I totally just didn’t see them.

So for me, adding in the bigger story, basically those pieces to it, where you can. Add in a short story here, it fleshes out the world that it answers questions that you may not have asked yet. At least for me.

Crys: No, I a hundred percent agree. Because my main character in my larger story will at some point be a journeyman mage in a completely different way than this short story main character will, but it is setting up the expectations of some of what surrounds that, that you leave your original place of training, generally. Not everybody does. Just like, when you go from your Bachelor’s to your Master’s, generally you leave to go get your Master’s somewhere else. But some places have the Bachelor’s and Master’s mashed up together kind of thing.

Oh, we both have students.

JP: Indeed. Yeah, mine, I have this weird, I guess you’d call it portal fantasy would be the correct term. But I had to figure out how these characters who live in what would be considered “our world” had magic for so long, because I have a group of magic users coming over and my bad guy isn’t part of that group.

So this answered those questions as to like, how could magic sustain itself in a world that I considered “dead” or “derived” of magic. So it was a fun experiment to get that answer. That isn’t done yet. So it’s a continual fun experiment. If I say it’s a fun experiment and finite it, then I won’t work on it.

Crys: Oh, goodness. I do need to write the short story. We do actually plan on submitting these somewhere. So we do have a deadline, which I need to look up so that it’s pressuring me. Yeah. So our question for the listeners this week, I think would be, what kind of tools do you use to write your stories?

We’ve talked about tarot in these two episodes because that was one I hadn’t used before, JP has. I do find it useful to pull me out of my rut, especially when I don’t have any ideas. The cards are amazing for that. I also use the Nutshell Technique and we use the Three Story Method and JP’s is the Pixar Pitch.

So we’re really interested to know what tools you use to inform your story.

JP: Yeah, let us know in the comments.

Crys: We’ll see you next week.

JP: See you later.