Counting Cards

by Tina Whittle

It was one of those social media things making its rounds on Facebook—share ten things that most people don’t know about you. I mentioned the usual—like being attacked by baboons on an elementary school field trip—but it was the last item that sparked the most conversation.

Once upon a time, I was a semi-professional tarot card reader.

Tarot is often associated with fortune telling, but I practice intuitive tarot, using the cards to engage the subconscious knowing so that it emerges in sudden hunches and gut feelings. This kind of tarot reading can feel a bit like playing hide and seek—sometimes it seems the harder you look, the more elusive your quarry becomes—but this is where my work as a mystery novelist comes in handy. For just like creative writing, tarot is all about creating a narrative

Tarot gives the subconscious a set of pretty pictures to play with, which sometimes lures it out of its hidey-hole. It’s this aspect of reading the cards that I find both most challenging, and therefore, most rewarding. When a reading starts to take shape, it’s the same feeling that happens during my writing when a crucial bit of backstory plugs right into a plot hole, or a previously misunderstood character motivation suddenly shines with clarity. There’s this bright burst of “aha!” followed by an almost effortless falling into place.

Like a good book, each tarot spread has a narrative thread running through the middle, connecting each image to a central theme. My job is to help my clients figure out this narrative for themselves. I interpret the cards, ask questions, make comparisons. But the heavy lifting of the reading is done by the client, not by me. I’m more of a midwife, guiding and encouraging and explaining as the answer to the question on the table starts to become more apparent.

The tarot functions as a tool, a channel, a container for meaning. And most of the time, the answer that bubbles up in response to the seeking isn’t a surprise. My clients already know what they need to know—sometimes they simply need a place to put that knowledge.

As a mystery novelist, I’m often stuck behind a computer making up imaginary scenarios for imaginary people. Tarot pulls me into the real world again, into the company of real people. It keeps me authentic, and it grounds me in the greater human narrative. Even with my skill at making stuff up, I don’t think I could have made up a better second job for myself than reading tarot.

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mysteries. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Better Than Brawling

by Tina Whittle

I got into a Facebook kertuffle this 4^th of July. It started with the usual ingredients (politics and identity and contrasting ideas about symbology) and ended in the usual place—with neither party having shifted one inch in their opinion.

It almost makes me want to stop sharing material that I know will pull some person who disagrees with me out of the woodwork and into an online spat. I mean, the fact-checking alone took up more mental bandwidth than I wanted to give something that was destined from the start to be an irreconcilable clash. The emotional cost was high too—I'm still treating the cracked molar I got from stress-grinding my teeth.

In the end, I kept asking, is this how it has to be? Is it at all possible to have a reasonable exchange of contrasting ideas in a social media context? And if the answer is no—and I think 90% of the time that's going to be the answer—does that mean we should nip the bud of such debates? Should we self-censor what we share, curate our feed so that it's more puppies and sunsets and fewer lightning rods and vinegar?

Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think misinformation should go unchallenged. But I also don't think we need to place any investments in the outcome of such challenges. And perhaps we don't always need to indulge in a protracted back-and-forth that is always going to end where it began—with two people disagreeing.

Here's what I think we need to learn to do—we need to learn to listen. I'm not talking about conversation, or dialogue, or debate. I'm not talking about words that are back-and-forth. I'm talking about deep, active listening to another human being's story.

A story is not a mutual exchange. It flows one way. One person gives, and another receives. Our brains are story-making—and story-processing—machines. It's how we first begin to understand our world, how we first begin to perceive our own place within it. Stories provide our greatest meaning-making tool.

All of us here at this blog are writers (and of course, readers). With every story we participate in, whether in the telling or the receiving, we strengthen the empathetic muscle of the world.

I wish I could sit in a big circle with everyone on this blog, with everyone reading this, and have each person tell me a story. Such an event would take logistics beyond my pay grade. In the meantime, however, perhaps a snippet of your life will do.

Care to share something about yourself or your world? Something big, something small, something unusual, something true?

Tell me a part of your story.

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Tina Whittle writes the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver mysteries. The sixth book in this Atlanta-based series—Necessary Ends—is available now. Tina is a proud member of Sisters in Crime and has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. Visit her website to follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter, or read additional scenes and short stories: www.tinawhittle.com.

Damn You, Elizabeth Strout by Carla Damron

I had the great honor of meeting my literary hero last month. Elizabeth Strout, author of Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge and five other remarkable novels, came to our local library. Not only did I get to meet her, I got to introduce her to the audience.

I had just hosted a three-day conference for close to five hundred social workers, and I’d addressed that giant crowd multiple times. But it was standing in front of the forty people at the library, about to introduce one of the best writers of our age, that had me nervous enough to practically hyperventilate.

“I feel like I’m eight years old and finally meeting Mickey Dolenz,” I texted my husband and sister. (For those of you who don’t know—and how could you not???—Mickey Dolenz was the dreamiest of all the Monkees.)

I began the introduction with a few paragraphs that Strout wrote in Olive Kitteridge:

“And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats--then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water--seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.” 
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

There is nothing particularly unusual about that passage. It’s similar to 300 other pages in that novel, which is what makes it so amazing. She paints a picture of what Olive sees, but she also takes us deep inside her, to that internal space that felt a “surging greediness for life.”

Strout taught at Queens University when I was there but I never got to study under her.  However, she has been my teacher. I read her writing like a hungry student: I mark passages that strike me. I ponder how, in this simple arrangement of words, she takes us so deep into her characters.

How the hell does she do it?

If you ask her, she will tell you that she is largely self-taught as a writer. She has a law degree, not one in creative writing. She will also tell you that it took YEARS for a publisher to discover her. But she always, always wrote. She peels back layers to uncover truths. Her narrative is both lean and luscious.

The New Yorker describes her writing: “Strout’s prose propels the story forward with moments of startlingly poetic clarity.”

I’m no Elizabeth Strout. But I also know that studying how she aligns words on the page, how she adjusts her lens from close-up to distant, and how she celebrates the beauty of language have helped me grow as a writer.  

And to be honest, it’s also made writing harder than it used to be. I no longer have patience for lazy writing—in others or myself. Every paragraph needs to have a reason to be there, and pretty writing is not a good enough reason.  Characters need to be real, three-dimensional people—even characters with tiny roles.

In my mystery/suspense writing, the same rules apply. My bad guy can’t simply be evil, he must also be human—likeable in some ways, flawed in others. My readers need to connect with him, and not just from fear. (Writing these sentences make me realize I need to work harder on my current antagonist.) The narrative must interest and engage the reader. I don’t want them to merely skim to follow the plot. I want them to enjoy words and sentences.

These are the new rules I write by, and it isn’t easy.  Nope. It’s not easy at all.

Damn you, Elizabeth Strout.

                                          I meet a hero, Elizabeth Strout