Don’t Write Alone Free Write
Divining Your Divergent Interests: The Card Oracle Method
The oracle part sounds mysterious, but it just means drawing cards from a shuffled deck and treating the results as an answer key for generating new writing.
Sign up now for Julian’s upcoming Catapult course, 4 Weeks of Reading Body Horror as Writers, here !
*
It’s common for anyone who enjoys research—or who really just draws inspiration from more than one area of their lives—to quietly collect hypothetical side projects, what-ifs, and trivia that don’t fit into anything they’re working on. Maybe you have a bunch of false starts, free writes, Wikipedia bookmarks, and mood boards that you can’t stop feeling moved to write about, but you worry trying to connect them would feel forced or, horror of horrors, only interesting to you.
However, synthesizing unexpected ideas can be one of the most delightful and fruitful approaches to creative writing, and you never have to truly “kill” the darlings that don’t work for a specific project. Cannibalize them instead!
First things first:
Gather everything you want to work with into a big list. This can be your notes app or the cascade of clippings and notebooks overtaking your nightstand, or a mix of both. The important part is that you find it easy to work with. It’s best if you have at least four, but there’s no upper limit for now.
As someone with a lot more ideas than time or energy , one organizational structure I’ve developed for combining my interests and generating new writing comes from the world of table-top role-playing games. I was skeptical for a long time about using game tools for fiction, because most of what I came across by that description when I first started writing were things like open-ended plot diagrams or character surveys that asked me to list my protagonist’s likes and dislikes. These weren’t things I found very helpful as a writer, because while I thrive with certain types of limitations, I also tend to shape and reshape my character’s voices and perspectives to suit the concepts I’m circling. So anything too general or too in-the-weeds felt more like procrastinating than brainstorming.
However, after playing a lot more games, especially from some really interesting independent designers—and after writing a few, too—I discovered a love for the Card Oracle. The oracle part sounds mysterious, but it just means drawing cards from a shuffled deck and treating the results as an answer key. Some writers enjoy using tarot cards for an oracle and following more archetypical associations that those can produce, but this is an oracle for the eggheads.
Now that you have your pile of ideas:
Grab a standard Vegas-style pack of playing cards and make any kind of five-column by fourteen-row table or grid. I like to freehand these in a notebook or on graph paper when I’m working in public or with another person, but I recommend using your spreadsheet or word-processing software of choice if you write at your computer. You can also edit directly in your browser with the Virtual Card Oracle tool I made to help me test ideas quickly. Your top row should have a blank left cell, followed by the four suits of the cards in any order you wish. The far-left column starts with the same blank cell and continues from Ace through King, though you can make Ace high or add another row for Jokers, as well. If that sounds confusing, check out the Virtual Card Oracle for an interactive example.
The idea of the Card Oracle is to take those rambling lists of ideas, images, quotes, moods, loose threads, slain darlings, and questions, then reapproach them conceptually by inventing a loose taxonomy for them and then use the surprise of shuffling and drawing cards to generate connections you would not otherwise find.
This is a process that can be especially helpful for creative writers with a tendency to intellectualize their emotions and interests, because it satisfies the urge to be idexical while forcing you to follow your intuition to get there. This approach does take some work, and it’s not the kind of exercise that simply keeps you in the writing habit, but it can cast a fresh light on things you might feel too close to or obsessed with to otherwise revisit.
Go over your list several times, combing for patterns. These similarities can be pretty abstract, and don’t have to reflect real world categories so much as your own internal relationship to your ideas. Begin grouping these possible relationships together and start to sort the groups based on the card suits.
For example, maybe you realize that you have a lot of things you’ve reminded yourself to look up later, but haven’t yet, as well as a lot of trivia or asides that you had to cut from your last draft for the sake of focus. You could keep things pretty simple and assign facts to both of the red suits and questions to both of the black suits.
Or maybe you notice that you’ve kept a lot of notes about settings and locations that evoke certain kinds of moods, so you let hearts be “Private Places,” diamonds be “Public Places,” clubs be “Wild Places,” and spades be “Unknown Places.” The point is less to force-fit everything you have and more to notice ways many unrelated things can be connected.
Build out entries for all thirteen of the card numbers—that’s fifty-two total—drawing from the groupings you’ve made with your list, as well as anything you want to add which occurs to you while working. The card numbers and letters can form a hierarchy, but they don’t have to. Don’t be discouraged if this takes a little experimenting or if you feel like you have to chip away at it bit by bit over a period of time. It’s not homework, just a different perspective on things you already care about.
For example, after really submerging myself in work on a haunted house story, only to cut a ton of things from it—theories and images which delighted me but just didn’t make sense for that draft—I wrote my “ What Kind of Ghost Are You? ” zine. Each suit is a classic type of haunting story, and I filled out the ranks of the cards with various actions and motifs that I associated with each respective type of ghost. Though the zine is presented as a personality quiz for some Halloween fun, the options are just selections from a card oracle about ghosts, which I now use to get started on other ghost stories without cramming them all into one or discarding them entirely.
Shuffle your deck and draw a low, odd number of cards. Whatever corresponds with these cards on your oracle are your prompts, but of course, you’ve already done the tricky work of placing them into a bigger, tidy context. Ideally, the connection you’ve just made through chance alone should seem a lot closer and more inspiring than it did before. Proceed to drafting!
For a deeper challenge, you can also use the ascending ranks of the cards to match beats of a narrative and iterate on what perspectives or details in scenes feel the closest to what you want to say. An example along these lines is “ Looking at the Fucked-Up Guy Looking At You ,” which is just straightforwardly a card oracle that I made to help myself explore how a close but antagonistic relationship can shape both parties. When I made it, I wanted to write for personal cathartic purposes about painful experiences I’d had with powerful people, but felt too overwhelmed by, let’s say, some recent proximity to the topic. The card oracle method helped me with this very different tenor of “too many ideas,” giving me some clinical remove to safely explore both the hope that you can change someone and the fear of turning into them from mimicking their style all the way up to repeating their most reprehensible actions.
In general, the goal of the Card Oracle method is not to make one template that generates any or every story, or to incorporate every single stray curiosity into your next draft. It’s a tool, not a test. Reshape it each time to suit your needs, or simplify it down to a table of individual nouns or verbs. Try it as another way to re-approach and embrace the specificity and repetition of what already drives you, and let the cards reveal some of the insights you didn’t know you had.
