What has your MC won?

Teneice Durrant, creator of Tarot with Ten, will use 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 Sun card to develop a victorious climax for your main character.

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, lining up the Fool’s Journey of the Major Arcana with the narrative arc of our main character.

So this month, we are getting very close to the end of our narrative arc. This month, we are talking about the Sun, and then we have Judgment and the World, and then we are all finished with the narrative arc. So once we wrap up the narrative arc and the Major Arcana, then I’m going to start kind of going more into the court cards and talking about how the different court cards could show up as characters in your narrative. And what those different court cards represent.

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

But today we have the Sun, and the Sun is the Leo card, which is kind of fortuitous since we just wrapped up Leo season. The Sun represents a lot of things: Success, vitality, life, growth, light, joy. You can see here on the Sun there are two people on the Rider-Waite-Smith iconography. It is a child riding a horse with a banner, you know, triumphant. It does represent being more childlike in your curiosity. It’s also important to remember that sunlight reveals things, right? The best disinfectant is sunlight. So when the Sun comes out, things get revealed.

Another thing to remember about the Sun, so there’s a lot of different ways you can come at this card, is that the Sun is a star, right? So it’s the only planet in astrology that is not actually a planet, right? We have the moon, which is like a, you know, a moon, a planetoid. But the Sun is a star, and it creates its own light, and it creates its own heat. It is not dependent on any other source of energy. It is the source of energy.

So those are all kind of aspects you can think about when you are working the Sun and its meaning into your narrative arc. So we are almost at the end of our journey, right? The Moon was that kind of last dark night of the soul, that last push through fear and anxiety and kind of getting through the really hard stuff.

And the Sun is when we win. Your main character has won. Victory may not look like what they thought it was going to look like, right? And that’s what next month when we talk about Judgment, the Judgment card, and how that’s like reflection and absolution and kind of looking back on the journey and figuring out what we learned, who we are, you know, how we’ve grown. That’s, you know, that comes after the success. We have to win. We have to accomplish something, right? We have to succeed.

And then we can look back and see how, you know, how we developed our character over that journey. So in terms of our narrative arc, we are coming to the end. This is the, you know, kind of climax, like the final battle, the final obstacle. You know, they cross the finish line. They have success. They figure it out. You know, at the last minute, they stop the bomb from exploding or cast the spell that saves the kingdom, whatever it is, right? This is the ultimate win, right? This is the climax. And it is very important that the payoff is real, right? That we’re not letting people down by making this win too small or making it so big that it wasn’t a win that our character earned, okay? This has to be the true, real, you know, the true, real battle and victory, okay? So let’s see what we can come up with for our final victory scene here.

All right. So we have the Fool, the Tower, and the High Priestess, okay? So what is this telling us about the victory that we need to have to round out this narrative arc? When we started on this journey, right? That’s the Fool. We started, you know, naive, just taking the clothes on our back, going off on this journey to fulfill some destination, either a personal, emotional, mental, right, psychological journey or a physical journey.

It’s interesting that these are all Major Arcana that came back for us with our success. So the success can be very disruptive to the whole, you know, world that you have built, right? So this Tower means that this win, this victory, is going to just completely upend anything that is not built on a solid foundation, okay? And we know, you know, from the Tower, that was our May reading, I believe, that, you know, anything that’s not built on a solid foundation really isn’t worth keeping around anyways.

So this victory has wide-ranging kind of disruption. Ultimately, it’s good disruption, right? You don’t want a life that’s built on sand, right? You want a solid foundation.

The result of this victory and this upheaval is that there is a more spiritual, grounded acceptance of things that are bigger than the character themselves, right? The High Priestess represents the mysteries of knowledge and learning and spirituality and, you know, the Moon, you know, kind of the hidden side of our emotions, the things that we keep secret that we can bring forward to help lead, okay? So I think it’s very interesting that we have the Sun and the moon here as kind of our counterpoints. We had the Moon last month.

So this High Priestess is acknowledging the dark night of the soul. She has the crescent here at her feet. She has overcome it. She has gone through the mystery. She has gone through the, you know, spiritual journey and is present in the physical world. So this scene here seems to be more of a psychological, spiritual, mental, emotional victory than a physical one, but you could take all of these literally in that, you know, the main character burned something down, right? And has a spiritual epiphany and becomes a religious leader.

That could be what, you know, the victory is for your story, or it could be, you know, the mental, emotional, psychological tower moment that leads to somebody who is so grounded and rooted in their spirituality and their learning, right? She has the scroll on her lap. She’s always learning. So this is a good place to pull in whatever kind of mental, emotional, you know, threads that you have going on for your main character and tie them into this victory so that it’s not only a physical victory, but it’s a, you know, personal, mental, emotional, spiritual victory as well.

All right. Thank you so much for joining me this month. Like I said, next month we will have the judgment card. We will round out the Major Arcana narrative arc with the World, and then we will move into our court cards. So thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you next month.

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. Teneice is available for mentorship in six-week generative writing sessions for those seeking guidance in poetry, fiction, chapbook-length manuscripts, creative research, and tarot/spiritual practice for generative writing and meditative practice.

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