Keeping a tarot journal: what to write down after a draw

The version of a tarot journal that survives past three weeks is short. Four lines per reading: the date, the question exactly as you wrote it before shuffling, the cards in the order and orientation they landed, and one or two sentences of what you made of it. Anything longer and you stop doing it, which makes the whole exercise pointless.

Writing the question first is the part people skip, and it is the part that makes the journal worth having. Questions drift during a reading. You start with "what is my part in this argument" and finish by reading the cards as a comment on whether the other person was unreasonable. A question written down in ink before you touch the deck is a fixed point you can check yourself against, both during the reading and six weeks later.

Record orientation, even if you do not read reversals. It costs one character, an arrow or a letter, and it means that if you change your mind about reversals in a year you can go back through your notes and see them. The same goes for recording which deck you used. Two Six of Swords images can look different enough that your old note stops making sense without it.

The interpretation line goes down before you look anything up. This is the single habit that moves you from reading with a book open to reading from the cards, because it forces you to say something about the image in front of you rather than reaching for a phrase. The note can be bad. "No idea, three cups and everyone looks tired" is a perfectly good entry. You will often find that the bad note is closer to what you were actually thinking than the tidy version you would have copied.

Rereading is what makes the notebook useful, and it wants a schedule or it will not happen. Once a month, read the last four weeks in one sitting. What you are looking for is repetition: the card that keeps appearing, the question you have now asked five ways, the reading you wrote off at the time that reads obviously in hindsight. A repeated card is not a message. Usually it means you keep asking about the same corner of your life, which is itself worth knowing.

Two things not to do. Do not write predictions and then score yourself on them, because that turns a reflective practice into a guessing game and the guessing game is not what the cards are for. And do not keep a separate book of card meanings copied out of guides. Your notes about the Five of Wands from your own readings will teach you that card better than a copied paragraph, and they will be in the same notebook where you need them.