Tarot: The Four Doors Spread

'Read as you can, not as you can't,' is one of my little principles which I keep on about. By and large it is true, but this week I am on annual leave and one of the things I want to do is practice this tarot spread which is perhaps best known for being used by his famous Miss Cleo. I don't understand, when I am perfectly capable of getting a narrative or picture from a line of cards, why I currently seem to be unable to do so with this spread, but I hope that is a situation which can be remedied.
You shuffle the deck and cut it into four piles, face down. You turn over the top cards and place them above so you have four face-up cards above the four face-down piles. You are supposed to turn them vertically so their orientation is reversed in this spread. I don't do reversals myself except when reading with an Etteilla deck, so I turn them horizontally, as is usual in cartomancy. You then turn over the top four cards of the piles so that you have eight cards face up. There are no exact positions but you read them sequentially, left to right and top to bottom. To carry on in time terms or get more information you move up the lower four cards and turn over four more, and you can do this until you get enough information. These instructions are based on the ones on aeclectic tarot forum and I have also read that it helps if you treat cards representing people as nouns and action cards as verbs. There is also a possible third class of cards, the archetypes, which can be seen as outer influences, or in my freeform reading in whatever way feels right at the time.
I notice that Miss Cleo herself used a mixture of psychic impressions, traditional meanings, and her own interpretation, so in reality didn't read that different to me.