Nine of Swords

I'm going to be posting daily prompts to inspire writing, art or journaling. Use these as you would like to help keep your creative practices moving.

Key words/ideas:

• isolation

• nightmares

• consuming negativity

Some thoughts that occur to me:

• This is a card about spiralling negativity. Such a spiral and escaping from it forms a useful character arc. How much of the spiral is external and how much is internal? How do you mirror the spiral in the language and themes?

• A character has a nightmare they are sure is a warning and goes to extreme lengths to avoid the outcome. Try to find a different take on this e.g. perhaps the dreamer is a member of a cult and dreams of their leader being arrested or killed.

• A character who achieved a huge victory and was well known for it disappears. When tracked down, they explain their all consuming sense of guilt. What for?

Note that cards are drawn at random and may be drawn more than once. In that case I will repost with an additional idea. I am going to cap the number of repeats at 3 until I’ve been through the whole deck, but other than this I let the luck of the draw decide. Coming up with more ideas for the same card will force me to be more imaginative and its something I strongly recommend.