# A worksheet, in ten steps *A reusable format. Take it, fill it, use it again — for making a worksheet, not for filling one in. It is the only format here whose output is another format.* --- ## What this is for A worksheet is a sequence of instructions somebody follows alone, and almost all of them are written as though the writer had nothing to say. This one is built on a different move: **each step gives an instruction and then says something that complicates it.** Not a warning, not a caveat, not a tip. A sentence that tells the person following the step something true which makes the step harder to complete innocently. *Name the thing you want to bring down* — and then, a few steps later, *you can never reach your target; you need to broaden your frame.* The instruction still stands. The person carries out a task while being told, in the same breath, what carrying it out means. **The complication is the content.** A worksheet of instructions alone is a form, and a form produces answers the writer already anticipated. A worksheet whose steps argue with themselves produces something neither party had — the person answering has to hold the instruction and its complication at once, and the answer comes out of that friction rather than out of the blank. Ten is the working length. Fewer and the complications have no room to accumulate; more and the person stops reading the second sentence of each step. *Where this comes from: **Worksheet: Mark a Target**, made at the Museum of Vestigial Desire in 2015, which is a worksheet of this shape rather than a description of one — [museumofvestigialdesire.net/…/worksheet-mark-a-target](https://museumofvestigialdesire.net/functions/laborataries/museums-in-museums/vacuum-suction/the-book-of-curses/worksheet-mark-a-target).* --- ## The format ``` 1 INSTRUCTION an act, small and immediately doable COMPLICATION something true that makes doing it harder 2 INSTRUCTION builds on 1, still small COMPLICATION … … 10 INSTRUCTION the last act, which is usually a naming COMPLICATION the one that reframes everything above it ``` Ten pairs. The instruction is what the person does; the complication is what they are told while doing it. Neither half works alone. ### What each half is doing **THE INSTRUCTIONS, taken together, are a route.** Each is small enough to do without deciding anything large — *write down one*, *pause*, *say it in a sentence*. They accumulate into something the person would not have agreed to at the start. That is the design: the route is walkable step by step and its destination is not visible from step one. **THE COMPLICATIONS, taken together, are the argument.** They can contradict the instruction, state its cost, generalise it past where the person wanted it to go, or tell them the task is impossible and to do it anyway. What they must never be is encouragement, or a hint about how to do the step well. A complication that helps is a tip, and a worksheet of tips is a form. **THE LAST STEP is different from the other nine.** Its complication reaches back and changes what the earlier steps were. Something the person did at step two turns out to have been about something else. This is the only place the format asks for a reveal, and it only works once. **THE PAUSE, usually around step four, is not optional.** One step that instructs the person to stop and picture something rather than write. Without it the ten run as a checklist and the complications go unread. --- ## A worked one Three steps out of ten, to show the shape rather than the whole: ``` 3 INSTRUCTION Write down what you would do to it, if nothing stopped you. COMPLICATION You are writing this because it will not happen. The writing is the whole of the doing. 4 INSTRUCTION Stop. Picture the relief afterwards. COMPLICATION The relief is the part you actually want, and it does not require the act. 10 INSTRUCTION Give the whole thing a name. COMPLICATION You are not the name, but a name is a handle — a surface for time to settle on. Without one you cannot refer back to any of this. ``` Step three instructs an escalation and immediately removes its consequence. Step four is the pause, and its complication is the sharpest line in the sequence — it tells the person the thing they came for is available without the thing they were about to do. Step ten does the reaching-back: the naming makes the previous nine into a record, which is not what they were while they were being done. --- ## How to use it 1. **Write the ten instructions first, with no complications at all.** You are looking for a walkable route. If step six needs a paragraph to justify, the route is wrong. 2. **Then write the complications, in one pass, out of order.** Written next to their instruction they come out as caveats. Written separately they come out as claims, which is what they need to be. 3. **Cut every complication that helps.** Read each one and ask whether it makes the step easier. If it does, it is a tip, and it goes. 4. **Put the pause where the sequence starts feeling efficient.** That is usually step four or five, and efficiency is the signal — it means the person has stopped reading and started completing. 5. **Write step ten last and let it change the earlier steps.** If nothing above needs rereading after it, the sequence has ended rather than closed. --- ## Three ways it goes wrong **The complications become encouragement.** *This is difficult, take your time.* Every one of them drifts this way if written in a good mood, and the drift is invisible while it happens: the sentences still sit in the right place, and the worksheet becomes a form with a sympathetic tone. **The route is not walkable.** A step asks for something that requires a decision the person has not made yet — *identify the underlying reason* at step two. They stop, and the remaining eight are read rather than done. **There are fourteen steps.** The length is not arbitrary. Past ten the person is completing rather than following, the complications go unread, and the last step's reach-back has nothing left to reach. --- *Prayas Abhinav. Licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.*