Hello beautiful blog readers!
One of the primary reasons I decided to revive this blog is because I am writing and thinking a lot lately about the tarot as a source of creative inspiration and guidance lately and have Things. To. Share. While a lot of that work is going into book manuscripts & class offerings, there are some odds, ends and tidbits I wanted to share with the world that don’t QUITE fit into those bigger projects.
One such tidbit is the idea of using the tarot cards as creative inspiration via a wordbank. Wordbanks are used primarily by writers but certainly by other creative artists to inform & inspire their work. A wordbank is essentially just a list of words you plan to use in a work, or sometimes that you use just as a jumping off point. For example, spoken word artist & poet Ollie Schminkey regularly posts Instagram poetry prompts, many of which will make you come up with a list of some sort that you then use as a wordbank for a poem. Tarot is, at its absolute bare basic root, a set of 78 images. To get some creative inspiration while stuck, I very frequently use these same principles, pull a card and just start listing things I see in the image.
For example, this Knight of Wands from the Smith-Waite Tarot Deck: Centennial Edition might spawn the following word banks:
From the image itself:
Knight, Wand, Horse, Riding, Armor, Facing left, Desert, Pyramids, Sand, Yellow, Orange, Silver, Sprouting.
You could also use what you know about the Knight of Wands beyond the visuals and might come up with the following list based more on keywords or interpretation:
Fast, Passionate, Fire, Creative, Raw, Fighter, Excited, Carnal, Young, Action
You then use your word bank(s) however you’d like. I like to write a poem, story or chapter simply making sure I use or plug in all of the words I listed out. For visual artists, you’d then create something featuring the words in your bank or create a work that somehow expressed them. Some people use wordbanking simply as a brainstorming exercise to warm your brain up. From that perspective, you would just write or create whatever you wanted after your bank gets your brain going.
Another option is to do a word bank and then simply fixate on a single word in it to create whatever it is they’re looking to create. For example, I might pick “Sprouting” to tell a story about how I am growing but doing so slowly after a big change. I might pick “Raw” to tell a story that makes me feel wildly vulnerable. A painter might simply play with shades of yellow, orange and silver or may decide to paint something fast and active, just to give you another example.
To go “next level” with your wordbank exercises, writers can use the wordbank to start each sentence with a word from your wordbank. Visual artists can go deeper by writing a quick story with each word in the bank, even though that isn’t your usual format. From there though, you’d make a representation of the story with your visual art.
You can get as fancy as you want with wordbanking. Try some crosses. Try three or more cards. (Both options pictured above.) Move your cards around & into different shapes to see how that effects the perceived body language or movement.
Let yourself get as creative as possible, but the trick is to not overcomplicate it. Use the visuals or keywords that stand out to you, but don’t list more than 15 or 20. You don’t want to create such a dense word bank that you can’t allow for creativity or movement between each keyword. If I listed every single thing on every card, there would be no room to tell an original story or create an artwork that hasn’t been seen. Make your work YOURS. Start with a 20 word or less wordbank, and just see how that moves you through a piece’s creation.
I hope you enjoy this exercise, and I’m so excited to see what you come up with!
Blessed Be Y’all - and Happy Wordbanking - XOXO,
Cassandra Snow
(P.S: If you want to share what you’ve created with this method, join me (and tag me) on Instagram or Twitter. If you want to support the work of this blog and social media, head to Patreon where you’ll also get other exclusive writing & content.)
