Tarot and Writing Fears
The system I've created in my new book
Writers get scared when writing.
If I’ve learned nothing else over the last few decades, it’s this: having an idea and writing it down in book form to share creates terror better than any horror film ever made.
Recently, I asked Footnotes subscribers to reply to an issue with their current writing fears. I have never gotten so many replies to a newsletter in the whole nine years I’ve written Footnotes. If you get scared when you write, you are far from alone. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that those who don’t get scared are in the minority.
Writing Through Fear
Over the past twenty-plus years, I’ve witnessed hundreds of students, clients, and myself in the grip of writing-related fears. Despite the inner critic whispering in your ear that you’re the only one, these fears form patterns that appear over and over.
Not only are you in good company for being scared, your fear is likely to look similar to a significant portion of other writers out there.
Let’s look at the patterns.
Archetypes of Fear
Life is a series of opportunities and challenges. Despite the uniqueness of our backgrounds, personalities, and experience, many of the things we long for are the same: Love, acceptance, belonging, comfort, and happiness.
In writing, we wish for similar results: publication, finding readers, building a community, making a living creatively, among other dreams.
The fears writers face usually involve reasons we won’t be able to achieve those wishes: not having the skills or ability, having flawed ideas, not being accepted, or never being able to set other responsibilities aside to focus on writing.
Often, these fears involve having missed a secret that will allow you to write. Perhaps you weren’t “gifted” the right way, or you don’t have talent. The idea of being a “real writer” often gets tied up here. We believe we were supposed to display an ability or learn something essential early on to be admitted to the real writer club.
In reality, nearly every writer fears being a fraud, even the ones with multiple books and even awards to their names. The concept of being a “real writer” is mysterious and appears to admit no one. And yet, we have books on our shelves. They had to come from somewhere, didn’t they?
The tarot of fear
As I began organizing all the fears students and clients had shared with me to present in book form, I realized another pattern was emerging: the experience of these fears tended to come in different flavors, so to speak:
Emotions: fear based on how the person felt about themselves, writing, or their idea
Thoughts: critical thoughts racing through their minds, often whispered on repeat by the critic
Motivation: fear took the form of feeling unmotivated or lacking the necessary drive to keep going to complete the project
Concrete results: fears about the tangible reality of a book — either the impact of writing it or the impact on life of having written and published it.
As those of you familiar with tarot will already have spotted, these flavors of fear match up neatly with the four suits of the tarot:
Cups: Emotions
Swords: Thinking and Intellect
Wands: Drive and motivation
Pentacles: Tangible reality
Structuring the book
Originally, I’d intended to write a book version of my novel intensive course, Dream to Draft. Some of you may have been subscribers to that experiment in 2023. However, as I explored writing about that course, the piece that felt most urgent to share was fear and how to write through it.
After cataloguing fears for a few months, I spotted the parallel with tarot and everything came to life. In 2019, Story Arcana: Using Tarot for Writing came out. In that book, I covered the major arcana as it applied to the author’s and main character’s journey. Ever since, I’d dreamed of returning to write about the Minor Arcana.
It’s a little embarrassing that I didn’t start with that premise, but I share the full story so you see the process behind the scenes. Things that look logical on the surface often involve a lot of fumbling around backstage, and I’m no exception.
Writing the damned thing
Once I had a philosophical construct, it was much easier to lay out and write the manuscript.
I work in Scrivener, so I started with a new nonfiction project and cleaned out all the elements that weren’t necessary. A clean blank slate helps me focus and plan.
Since this book had a clear correlation of one fear per minor arcana card, I made a folder for each suit and then a sub-document for each card, from Ace through 10. Before beginning actual drafting, I made notes for each card on the fear I felt it corresponded to and any examples or anecdotes I wanted to include.
I then set a schedule when I wanted to finish the manuscript, added time for revision, factored in proofreading, formatting, and working with a cover designer, and based on a brilliant consult with
, I settled on May 23 as the publication date. Stay tuned for pre-order news, coming soon!And since then, I’ve been off and running. I’m lucky enough to run The Manageable Yet Meaningful Writing Lab, which features multiple study halls with members each week. Since I show up to host these, I also get to spend that time writing and have nearly completed the book in those sessions alone. Never underestimate the power of community and writing together silently.
Here’s hoping we can work through our fears and keep writing. Fear is part of the writing process, not a sign you’re doing it wrong.
If you’re a visual person, and want a tour of my writing set-up, I’ve made a video of the layout above with some additional tips on how I set up project targets and other features, available to paid subscribers of Book Alchemy: