Formats›A curse, in six lines

A curse, in six lines

A reusable format. Take it, fill it, use it again. Every other format here is a test you run on something that already exists. This one makes something.

What this is for

A curse is a prediction, not an insult, and everything about the form follows from that.

An insult is aimed at a person and lands or fails immediately. A curse is aimed at an arrangement, takes years, and describes what will happen rather than what you would like to happen. It says the world is amoral but that an account is being kept, and it hands the settling of that account to time rather than to you. This is why a good curse is oddly calm. The anger is in the noticing, not in the delivery.

The second thing to know is that a curse names a harm as a gift. May you find meaning in mindless drudgery. Have money for everything, but no desire. Nothing is taken away in either of those; something is granted, and the granting is the harm. That is the move the form exists for, and it is why writing one is harder than it looks — the wish has to be genuinely a wish, and it has to be terrible.

A curse is a signpost. It says there is more disarray in an arrangement than the surface admits, and that the quiet is not peace. Filling this in is a way of writing down a tension you can see and have no way to act on. It is not a productive act and it is not meant to be.

Where this comes from: The Book of Curses, written at the Museum of Vestigial Desire in 2015 — museumofvestigialdesire.net/…/the-book-of-curses.

The format

THE TARGET      the arrangement it is aimed at, named without insult

THE FULFILMENT  the harm, written as something granted rather than taken
THE OPERATOR    who or what is imagined to have a say in whether it lands
THE TENSION     what is wrong underneath that this is a signpost to
THE SPAN        when it comes true, which is never soon and never dated

NOT THIS        what would make it an insult instead of a prediction

A target above, a refusal below, and four lines between.

What each line is asking

THE TARGET. The arrangement it is aimed at. An arrangement, not a person — a habit a whole trade has, a way a room is always run, a thing everybody agrees to pretend. A curse aimed at one named individual collapses into abuse, and the form cannot carry it. If the only honest target is a person, the thing you want is not this.

THE FULFILMENT. The harm, written as something granted. This is the whole difficulty. May your work always be praised by people who have not read it grants praise; the harm is entirely in what the praise is made of. Test the line by asking whether somebody could receive it as a blessing and be right for about a second.

THE OPERATOR. Who or what is imagined to have a say. A curse assumes something is listening — not necessarily a god; time, the market, the profession, the weather of a field. Naming it is what keeps the line from being a mood. It also tells you whether you believe the curse, because an operator you cannot name is a curse you do not expect to land.

THE TENSION. What is wrong underneath. This is the line that makes the exercise worth doing rather than merely satisfying: the curse is a symptom and this is the reading of it. If you cannot fill this in, what you have written is a bad mood in fancy dress.

THE SPAN. When it comes true. Never soon, and never a date. Eventually, and nobody will be able to say which week it began is the right shape. A curse with a deadline is a threat, and a threat is answerable in a way a curse is not.

NOT THIS. What would make it an insult. Usually one of three: it acquires a name, it acquires a date, or the harm becomes something taken away rather than given. Say which one it is closest to, because that is the edge it will fall off.

A worked one

THE TARGET      The convention that a thing is finished when it is
                shown, in every trade that shows things.

THE FULFILMENT  May every one of your works be received exactly as you
                intended, on the first showing, by everyone present.
THE OPERATOR    The audience, collectively and without conferring —
                the only body that could deliver this and never has.
THE TENSION     Showing is treated as an ending because an ending is
                billable. Nothing about the work agrees.
THE SPAN        It arrives slowly and looks like success while it does.
                You will notice around the fourth or fifth time.

NOT THIS        Name a person who does this and it becomes a remark
                about them, which is a smaller thing and answerable.

The fulfilment line is doing the work: perfect reception is the harm, because a work received exactly as intended has told you nothing you did not already know, and the curse is that this happens every time.

How to use it

1. Find the arrangement first, not the feeling. The feeling will be there already. The line worth having is the one that says what the feeling is about, and that is usually a practice rather than a person.
2. Write THE FULFILMENT as a wish, and keep rewriting it until it is one. If it reads as something being taken away, it is not there yet. May you and have and find are the openings that work; lose and never are the ones that give it away.
3. Name THE OPERATOR even if you do not believe in it. The line is about who you are addressing, not about what exists.
4. Do THE TENSION last, after the harm is written. Done first it becomes an argument with a curse attached. Done last it is a reading of something you have just made and did not fully plan.
5. Leave it. There is nothing to do with the finished thing. That is not a shortcoming of the format.

Three ways it goes wrong

It is aimed at somebody. The target line takes a name and everything below it becomes a way of saying something about that person at length. This is the common failure and it happens on the first line, which is why the first line asks for an arrangement.

The harm is a subtraction. May you never work again is a threat with a wish's grammar. The form asks for a gift whose contents are the harm, and the difference is not decorative — a subtraction can be argued with, and a fulfilment cannot.

It is dated. A span that names a year converts the whole thing into a prediction that can be checked, and then either fails or is forgotten. The vagueness is load-bearing. Eventually is the strongest word in the format.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: curse-format.md. Yours to alter.