Tap into your MC’s creativity

Tarot reading for writers March ‘26

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. March’s prompt is about using the Temperance card to develop an opportunity for your main character to use creativity to overcome heartbreak.

Hi everyone, welcome to On Deck. My name is Ten, and I’m a third generation tarot reader, a writer, and a mentor with the Center for Creative Writing. We’re currently working our way through the Major Arcana of the tarot and lining up the fool’s journey with the narrative arc for our main character.

So this month, we are looking at the Temperance card. This is number 14. We’ve just had the Death card, and we are looking at everything, all the pieces that are left over, and we’re trying to decide what to do next.

Using the Temperance card to tap into your MC’s creativity

Watch and listen to Teneice’s tarot reading for writers or read the transcript of the reading below.

In the Major Arcana, the Temperance card represents art in that if you think about a painting, there’s a literal cost to it. How much the canvas costs, the paint, the brushes, the easel, the art school. There’s a literal cost to the painting, but that’s not what the painting is worth, right? So this card is about taking different pieces, picking up pieces, and drawing on your own inner creativity.

As humans, we are creative, right? We create, that’s what we do. And whether your art is creating birdhouses or a pot roast or a mural or a work of fiction or a classical composition or friendship bracelets with your kids, that’s all art. You’re taking physical things that have a literal value and creating something priceless or creating something with those things and your own skill that are of a higher value than just the literal value, okay? So if you take a look at our Temperance card here, he’s got, this is represented as the angel Gabriel, and he’s got one foot in the water, one foot on land, so he’s balancing between the physical and the emotional.

And when we create, that’s where we create from, is our emotional experiences in the world. We create from our emotional truth, which is different than the literal truth, okay? And he’s kind of pouring these cups, this water, back and forth between these two cups, and sometimes the symbology here is like turning water into wine, right? You take something and with your own skill and power and emotion and talent, turn it into something else, okay?

So what does this mean for our main character if we’re looking at our narrative arc of the story, right? Our main character has just had this either tragedy, they’ve lost somebody, right, with the Death card, or almost lost somebody, or they’ve almost died, right? And things are shifted into a new perspective now. So our main character has to embody the artist in whatever way that means.

Maybe they have to pull together different pieces from a junkyard to engineer a new car to get them through the rest of their journey, or some kind of booby trap to catch the bad guy, right? Or some kind of research, and they’re running through the library pulling out different translations of things, like whatever it is. Your main character is going through kind of the shrapnel, right, what’s left over after this tragic event, and making something new out of it because they have had an emotional experience and they have learned something from that experience and they’re taking that, you know, new knowledge and that emotion and they’re looking at what they’ve got in front of them and they’re creating the thing that they need to get them to the next step on their journey, or maybe to get them all the way to the end, you know? This is, I’m trying to think of a good example but I can’t think of one off the top of my head. You know, in a movie where the main character is like teamed up with a buddy and they’re trying out, it’s like a little montage, they’re trying out all different kinds of catalytic converters or fuels or whatever and, you know, hand me a socket wrench, hand me a screwdriver, and they’re putting together some kind of thing that shouldn’t work but it does because of the ingenuity and the emotion, the experience that the main character has lived through, okay?

So let’s do a little writing prompt here. Let’s pull a few cards and see if we can get a writing prompt for this scene. In this situation here, okay, those are three cards. All right, so we have, okay, Four of Wands, that’s definitely a coming together, an Eight of Wands, and a Three of Swords. Okay, make sure you can see all those.

Three of Swords

Let’s start with the Three of Swords because that’s kind of the most prickly one here. The Three of Swords is kind of like the Minor Arcana Death card. That would also be, you know, the Ten of Swords. But the Three of Swords is like the death of a feeling, of a relationship, like a heartbreak, you know, being betrayed, right? So this could indicate that their, you know, main character, the death that we experienced last month, whatever that scene was, that was the heartbreak. That was the grief, right? That was the kind of pain that’s motivating this.

Four of Wands

Or if you want to throw a kink in the plot, you could have, you know, your B character working with your main character, right? Coming together, you know, with the Four of Wands is a marriage card, but it’s also like just a foundation card. It’s like coming together and building a strong foundation. It could be, it’s also like a finish line, cross the finish line, they’ve celebrated something.

Eight of Wands

And the Eight of Wands is very rapid movement, travel across long distances, like rapidly traveling. You know, you see the scenes where they’re galloping the horse at breakneck speed across the desert, right? That’s kind of the same feeling as the Eight of Wands.

A writing exercise

So there’s a lot of different, interesting kind of scenes you could come up with from these cards. It might be that the main character is so turned around by their loss that they kind of fall into this marriage or this partnership or this kind of union, which very rapidly devolves into heartache. And they realized that they were just trying to fill in, you know, the gap, the hole, that whoever died left. Okay.

But if we’re thinking about in terms of like, we need to kind of pull together, patch something together, you know, to get it to work. That could be this where, you know, people come together, or maybe they reach out to a contact to get a part or a book or a formula or, you know, whatever aligns with your story. And this is kind of that montage of putting the thing together, piecing all the things together, and then somebody steals it from them and betrays them with it.

Or they realize that if they use this thing that they’ve created, they’re betraying somebody. Either they’re betraying the person who they lost or almost lost, or that grief changed them so much that they end up using what they have made to betray themselves or to betray somebody who was important to them. Okay.

So that’s your writing prompt for this week. Write us a scene where your main character is on the other side of some tragic or almost tragic loss, and they need to go within themselves with this Temperance card and create art, create something that is more than the sum of its parts. And the way they do that is with a union with somebody, maybe an unlikely pairing.

They’re very rapidly moving through creating this thing. Maybe not, like there’s no, there’s no swords here. It’s just wands. Wands is creativity and passion, but maybe they’re not thinking it through. Maybe they’re not seeing all of the ramifications of their actions and they get betrayed by it. Okay.

All right. Thank you so much for joining us for On Deck this month, and we’ll talk to you next month. Thanks.

Teneice Durrant holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in Literature. She is currently a candidate for a Ph.D in Psychology and has an affinity for what she likes to call “creative research.” She has 18 years of teaching experience and poetry publications, including four chapbooks and the full-length collection, Glass Corset (2019), and more than 15 years as an editor and publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Teneice has been reading Tarot since 2013 and using Tarot as a writing tool with her students since 2019. She is available for generative writing sessions and private writing guidance in our next six-week writing session that begins April 14.

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