Exchange of Realities

One of the biggest things I’ve found that destroys twists is someone seeing it coming. For many people, the answer to this is to try to avoid foreshadowing if at all possible (cheating!), or keep any foreshadowing so subtle that the only way to find it is after the fact. But in most of the predicted twists I’ve seen, it’s not explicitly foreshadowing that’s given it away.

Instead, what’s happened has just been standard use of what my good friend the Generic Villain calls the Laws of Dramatics: while the situation isn’t explicitly foreshadowed, the pattern of the story just fits with it. I once saw this with a friend of mine, running a city-based mystery game which I’d had to leave for most of a summer because of my work schedule. As I’m getting ready to return he’s summarizing what happened. Locating the person they were supposed to rescue, desperately sneaking out, and just as they were getting onto a high point with a view past the city walls, and dawn broke….

We were in a chatroom, and before he could send me the next part, I said, “Soldiers outside the walls, right?” It was.

Essentially, what’s going on here is that there are only so many ideas out there, twists are popular, and when these two factors mix, it’s that much likelier that someone who knows the patterns is going to figure out which one this one is. This goes double when they know you particularly well, as they can narrow it down to what kinds of influences you’re likely to be getting your ideas from, reducing the likelihood of their having the right pattern but the wrong genre. So in the case of my friend with the castle, I expected soldiers because the Laws of Dramatics say that when you’re standing out on the battlements or the city walls or what have you, dawn’s breaking (technically optional, but raises the Drama Level), and there’s something to see out there, it’s usually an army.

How do we avoid it? One of my favorite techniques is one my creative writing professor taught me for ending short stories: you figure out what the most likely ending is, scrap it wholesale, and try to come up with something else that follows naturally from the information you’ve got. The logic here is that if the twist is your first idea what would make a satisfying twist, it’s probably your audience’s as well. If you’re feeling particularly clever, move things in such a way that it encourages people to come to the same conclusion; my game’s mystery arc, for instance, fully incorporated the idea that just the possibility of my finger-in-every-pot manipulator being involved would be enough to get people thinking he did it.

Another is to actively dissect your twists, to figure out both what makes them twisty and what might make them obvious. In particular, if you know part of your audience knows your patterns, think about the patterns they know and try to actively avoid them. Are you the kind of person who lays down a clue that’s almost too obvious? Subvert it. (Or, if you’re the type who usually subverts it, don’t.) Have a character who usually did it? For once, resist the temptation to put her at the end of the trail. If you’re in a pre-existing world and most of your plot points involve characters someone else invented, try to bring out a non-pre-existing one. Or, if you avoid canon like the plague, sneak a canonical in because he’ll be ruled out immediately. Basically, figure out what story people think you’re in, then try to tell a slightly different one with the same facts.

Foreshadowing may be a danger, but it isn’t the danger; predictability is. Watch out for that, and you have little to fear.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t dream up complex scenes that they totally want to run because it would be seventeen kinds of awesome with a cherry on top. I’d never say that; those are beauty, and I think the pursuit of beauty is an important goal for a writer or a gamer. I do, however, think that people shouldn’t hang their dreams for a story on them, particularly not if the story is an RPG and not a novel. For everything, there’s a risk. For that, there are three that I’ve seen, and probably many more.

In all these cases, the same thing happens. We get this image, of a grand, grand epic scene, something that’s not going to happen for a while, and we decide we want to see it. So we design ourselves a scene, and we start trying to shape things to make sure it happens. That’s where the trouble starts, and one of the three risks kicks in. What are they?

One, the most obvious, is the scene’s aversion. It could have happened, we were ready for it to happen, but it didn’t. If we’re running a game, maybe it was something the group did—I once had an idea for a meeting between my group and my primary antagonist that was prevented twice, in two different forms, because the group kept not going where I thought they would. If it’s a story, maybe it’s something about the characters, a realization that for whatever reason, it just wouldn’t work that way. Some people try to force the scene anyway, throwing suspension of disbelief and free will by the wayside to ensure this one moment. It doesn’t generally work, and is likelier to annoy people who would have enjoyed it otherwise.

The second is our own loss of interest. For people who aren’t long-thinkers, this is a very strong risk: that somewhere in the time between when this idea first struck us and when we actually get to execute it, we lose our spark for it, and the lack of enthusiasm removes one of the vital qualities from the situation itself. While I think it should be salvageable by reminding ourselves what’s important about the scene, I don’t often have to deal with that one—my problem is more the third:

Anticipation. This one’s a major threat for the people who can plan something six months ahead and still remember it when a year’s gone by and it’s not time yet, and the perfectionists. In short, people like me. What happens here is that the scene is a constant in our minds. We’ve been working on it for weeks and weeks, changing a detail here, testing different background music there, figuring out how we’d incorporate different contingencies and how best to foreshadow it, slipping foreshadowing in and worrying about whether it was too blatant. In our mind’s eye, it’s perfect. But that’s it’s downfall. We’ve had scenes like this before, gotten to execute them, and they failed. And looking back over it, we know why they failed. So we become afraid to execute the scenes we’ve built up our anticipation of, because we know that our platonic ideal and what we actually create aren’t going to be the same thing. Why risk it? (Not to mention that once we’ve done the scene, it’s over. No more planning. No more ideas. No more editing, nor bursting into maniacal laughter in the middle of the night as you come up with a grand alteration.)

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t plan scenes like that ahead. But it does mean that we shouldn’t hang too many of our hopes on these plans; rather, we should be prepared to accept the risks that they create, and find ways to work around them.

Like any other literary device, a twist is just one piece of a storyteller’s toolkit. On the other hand, it’s one of the most difficult to use properly, but one of the strongest if so used. A twist can bring forth intense reactions, make an otherwise commonplace story into something new and exciting, and build suspense in a way that almost nothing else can. What makes it so powerful, and so dangerous?

In essence, a twist is a development of some sort, usually in the form of a revelation or an unexpected event, that takes an event or a plotline in a direction completely different from the expected conclusion. Most of these are very immediate, as plot-determining events go; they have little if any foreshadowing, and depend mostly on the element of surprise to make their impact.

The most obvious appeal to a twist is the emotional intensity that it brings. Love them or hate them, most people react more strongly to surprises than they do to things they’d been expecting. A twist is a stone in the reflection on the water, a disruption of the comfort zone, a break in the pattern. It’s change. Needless to say, this is why people react so violently to spoilers; not only is there a chance that they’re going to dislike the direction in which the plot’s going, but they lose out on the shock from the first revelation. Moreover, all the careful foreshadowing that’s only meant to be figured out in retrospect sticks out like neon signs, taking away from the initial illusion and immersion. This is also why, to work, a twist really does need to be difficult to see coming; if the twist is one of a popular pattern, it might be too easy to predict, effectively spoiling itself before it can take hold.

On the other hand, out-of-nowhere twists have their own risks, too. When a twist is foreshadowed, even in ways that only make sense in retrospect, the twist itself feels organic as it happens. “Unexpected but inevitable,” the short story writers say of their endings, and the same should describe a twist in retrospect. But a twist with no foreshadowing, particularly if it isn’t explained or justified later, often brings up at least one of two reactions. Either it’s seen as a blatant display of authorial manipulation, jerking the audience’s emotions around for the sake of a reaction, or it comes across as a deus ex machina, pulled out of who-knows-which of the creator’s orifices as a shoddy substitute for a well-crafted plot. (Unless, of course, it’s an ancient Greek drama, in which case the deus ex machina is a given and thus not a twist at all.) Both come across as cheating, both imply disrespect for the audience, and neither is an optimal conclusion.

And don’t underestimate the dangers of overuse. Use twists too regularly, and people begin to expect twists; the question soon becomes not whether there will be a twist but what the twist will be. Which makes it likelier that someone will see the twist coming, which goes back to our earlier point about the dangers of foreknowledge.

Twists are unpredictable, intense, and very tricky. But handle them with care, and they’ll prove to be a vital addition to your collection of techniques.

Minions. They’re not a requirement for a villain like us, but darkness knows they’re useful. In fact, many of our kind depend on having a decent stable of minions to take care of the dirty work. But like any other sort of raw material, they come in a wide variety of qualities, some more suited to the task at hand than others. What sort of features does a good minion need?

First and foremost, loyalty. I don’t care if it’s because you’ve bought them off and they stay bought, or because they believe in the rightness of your cause, or even because it doesn’t occur to them that there are options other than serving you. The point is, the minion has to follow you. Not your buddy Steve. Not some moral compass that can be used to turn him against you. If the minion does not serve you, either his priorities need to be straightened out or he needs to be removed from his position. If he can be turned against you, anything you’ve trusted him with is going to go against you too.

Next is survivability. Sure, you can just replace them, but that means training up new guys, fitting them for uniforms, having to worry about personnel shortages or difficulties with finding labor, and general decreases in morale as either the numbers are changing every incident or you’re getting cases where 72 has seniority over 5 because you’re just filling in gaps. (Okay, among other things.) But if you’ve got survivable minions, not only do you not have to worry about replacing them, but they’ll come back with information, possibly learn from their mistakes (don’t count on it, though), and maybe lull the heroes into overconfidence because they always seem to lose.

If you can, get competence and usefulness. The real kind, not the informed kind. If the academy churning them out prides itself on their precision shooting, make sure it also teaches accuracy. (If you don’t know the difference, go grab a dictionary real quick; I’ll wait.) If they’re supposed to be able to take on ten normal men at one go, make sure they can also handle women, children, abnormal men, nonhuman species, things without concept of gender, etc, and that that’s in applicable sorts of contests rather than being able to outknit them (unless your plan depends on knitting skills, anyway). Basically, these people are supposed to be carrying out your evil plans. If they can’t carry them out, why are you wasting your resources on them?

Minion initiative (not to be confused with minion initiative modifiers, which should always be high but not as high as yours) is more of a balancing act. On the one hand, you want your minions to be primarily accustomed to taking your orders without too much question. On the other hand, if all they can do is follow orders, they’ll freeze up when acting on their own, and that’s just not pretty. Besides, minions with brains in their heads are useful; you can steal their ideas, take the credit, and maybe save your skin that way when the flunkie turns out to be right. I find follower tendencies in the 75-80% range to be optimal.

Don’t settle for suboptimal minions. They break under stress, slow you down, and generally make trying to execute a plan even more difficult than it would be otherwise. Remember standards!

This week, the Generic Villain gives us our base article. You may have noticed the example in the post on innocuous dwellings, the description of one such place that goes beyond not-evil and starts looking like something you might see in a more benevolent sort of place or a good god’s temple. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that that’s actually a landmark from my own games; I originally designed it as a way to mess with my players’ heads when they were going against their first major antagonist. It fit pretty well with his thematics; I wouldn’t call him quite “evil for a good cause”, but he considered what he did to mostly be duty.

From a distance, it had looked like it could reasonably be an evildoer’s residence. Big, imposing, black walls, demons on guard, you get the idea. From there, the group went into an outer building that had sort of an onion effect (this turned out to be important later, when they triggered the magical defenses) and was decked in black marble tiles and frescoes on the walls. And doors, lots of doors (also important later). But then they found the inner door, faint not-quite-sunlight shining through it, stepped through with a certain amount of confusion (sunlight?) and immediately began wondering if they were in the right place.

Where they stepped was into a courtyard. The light was dim—shadowlands tend to do that—but it was the kind of light they expected from the outdoors. The ground was covered with grass, rather sickly-looking. A flagstone path led towards the central tower, and on either side of the path were statues, some standing and some kneeling, all exquisitely carved and all looking up with expression of awe. This was a thought-out design decision; not only did it support the thematics that his style of magical architecture was supposed to use, but it was also an allusion and a homage to his own patron. And, well, beautiful: always a good way to put people off balance.

At the end of the flagstone path, they found the door to the central tower, unguarded. It was of mahogany wood, set with crystals (another allusion to his patron) around a Celtic knot of materials in bright red and brilliant gold that, due to their surroundings and in contrast to the very dim light illuminating the place from skyward, practically glowed. Part of this was just for the continued “Ooooh, pretty!” effect, and that worked: by this time, they were mostly agreeing that destroying the place was NOT in the game plan as it had been not long before. Another part was convenient circumstances; along with being pretty, the stuff the knot was made of was pretty strong, making it that much more difficult to bash through the door.

Then they open the door and find that the full first floor is a ballroom, tiled with a huge mosaic. This is when I threw in my other “wait a minute, what are we dealing with here?” element: a stunningly pretty young woman, with whom about half the party was familiar, who looked over at them, smiled, and asked, “Tea?” Her name was Rukan, and she had been my secret weapon for a while. You know the Evil Overlord’s daughter, the one as evil as she is beautiful? Yes, Rukan was my main antagonist’s eldest daughter. Yes, he’d left her here with the means to bring him in should the group do something for which she was unprepared (which was almost anything involving actively trying to carry out their plans, as Rukan was an excellent talker but next to useless in a fight). Yes, she was beautiful. But Rukan was also genuinely nice, actually concerned about everyone involved, and doing her level best to arrange a compromise. And for most of the group, trying to figure out whether this was the real her, or whether she was just a really good manipulator (both, apparently, was not an option), put the group even farther off-balance.

Which meant the last thing they were expecting was one of their own betraying them. That incident was fun.

I’ve known a lot of people who are good at action, can do big, sweeping fate-of-the-world stuff until the cows come home, and have characters who are never short of larger than life—but ask them for understated reactions or mundane situations and they can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do. It’s just not interesting enough to hold their focus. But the appropriate mindset for the small stuff can be trained, and this is one way.

The short version is that the answer is to go miniscule. So get your notebook, and pick yourself a subject. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, except that it’s got to be one discrete thing. Size doesn’t really matter; pebbles and mountains are equally applicable. It can be alive—heck, you can even use a person for this exercise if you can convince them to sit still long enough. And it doesn’t really matter how long it’s been around, though a first-timer will probably find the exercise easier with an older item.

Got it? Good. Now start writing. Begin with a physical description, going into as much detail as you can. Pay close attention to the things that set it apart: is there something about the color? Has it been scuffed or damaged? If it moves, how does it move? Then branch out a little. If you can think of, or you know, a cause for one of its traits, particularly a distinguishing trait, write about that—don’t worry if you have to speculate, since that’s half the fun. Does anything about your subject seem to carry a hidden meaning? If so, what, and what does it appear to mean? You can write about its history, or if you’re feeling brave write about a reasonable future for it. If there’s a way to change how you see it—your angle, how the light hits it, what kind of ambient light it’s under, stuff like that—change that, then write about the changes. Interact with it and write about that. How many pages can you get?

You’ll note I didn’t say writing exercise when I titled this article. That’s because you don’t want to describe an object in this much detail in a story, even if your viewpoint character is the type who’d examine one that closely, and heaven forbid you try it with a gaming group. Instead, the object here is to work with your mindset. After all, to write in this much detail, you have to find details to write about, and since we’re dealing with something mundane, there’s no hiding behind mystical auras or extrasensory means of perceiving it. The only way to get a decent amount of material is to start seeing new facets of the thing as interesting.

I owe this idea, in a sort of roundabout way, to Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning. Midway through, he references a story, itself from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There’s a girl with an assignment, to write a 500-word story about her hometown, but who can’t figure out how to get five hundred words out of something that normal. The answer she’s given is, instead, to go write about the front of the opera house on a small street nearby, starting with one of the bricks. It probably sounded as odd to her as to anyone else, but twenty pages of writing later, any doubts she had about that little exercise were long gone.

The way I see it, the people who can only do big and sweeping are like the student in the anecdote; they’re just not used to looking for the interesting aspects of the little details. Instead, they sweep past them, focusing instead on trying to find their inspiration in bigger and splashier. But after you’ve spent an hour contemplating a flower or fifteen minutes meditating on the bubbles rising in a cup of soda, you’ll probably start picking up a few patterns of what sorts of smaller things might be interesting.

And even for someone who already has an eye for detail, it can’t hurt to practice. Give it a try!

One thing I’ve noticed about blogs is that they’re all in the moment. A post appears, is discussed for a little while, then vanishes into infinity; while some people do do archive trawls, it’s not as necessary for understanding the current material as archive-trawling a webcomic, and if a post is going to be necessary, odds are the writer will back-link from whatever later post references it.

So I’m going to try to make a monthly practice of dredging up some of the better year-old posts from my copious archives, now that I have a year to dredge up posts from. This time: June-July 2008, or the months I missed by not thinking of this sooner, and a little context. (Warning: Posts have minor paragraph spacing issues. The format I used when this blog was in its original form handled spaces differently, and network non-revision policies meant I never got the chance to fix it.)

Expository Wisdom focuses on exposition without boring the audience too much, including some ways to get readers intrigued or player characters actively asking.

Scene It Already! discusses tips for getting a scene across, including nontextual cues and one example. Warning: long post.

What We Didn’t Say demonstrates exposition through subtext, as demonstrated by my volunteer side character, Ruby. This wasn’t her last appearance, either; I later used her as my demonstration character for an early method of character creation, and then later to show the applications of a three-post series on character development through crises.

Ever gotten bored with the standard magical imagery? I do. Why Do We Always See Magic? looks at the reasoning behind visual-centered magic descriptions and some possible alternatives.

Lament of the Generic Villain, the original Generic Villain post that gave me my snarky den-parent of all things villainous, actually came from my having had one of those days, complete with writer’s block. That is, until my loyal editor, listening to me rant about why, tempting though going evil was at times like that, I’d never actually do so, pointed out that it sounded like I had a post right there.

While I rarely write posts that aren’t applicable to gaming one way or another (I thank the RPG Bloggers’ Network for prompting that), July of 2008 was good for two. One, The Problem With Speculative Fiction, was my manifesto against the shoddy internal critique from which speculative fiction suffers even today; the other, On Message Fiction , was a look at why the moral of the story is that a story written around its moral turns off its audience.

Check them out!

Author’s note: You may be noticing that the comment feature on this blog is disabled. This was a network decision and not in any way my fault; when it is rectified, I’ll let you know. I still take suggestions and comments through the email address found on my About page. Thank you!

Orientations. Most of us have probably been through at least one, for work, or school, or something else. They’re pretty much a fact of dealing with large organizations, after all. Bunch of people leading you around the system telling you things that were already in the manual, except that every now and then there’s something useful slipped into all the whats and wherefores, or something happens that makes it interesting.

Photo by Michal Zacharzewski

Writers avoid them, gamers more so. Can you blame them? Most orientations are an infodump of epic proportions. Granted, it’s justified to have the announcer going on and on, but it’s also dead boring. On the other hand, there are useful things that can be learned, and sometimes there’s something else going on. Meeting someone, perhaps. Making discoveries. Coming to realizations about the job and what it means (and not always negative ones, either). In fact, one could say that those are the only good reason to run an orientation. The audience is likely to remember standard operating procedure through trial and error, after all.

So how does one execute a scene couched in an orientation?

First off, figure out what the parts that are actually going to matter are, and how many of them actually connect to the orientation itself. Is it an unusually surprising bit of information? Meeting someone? The oddity of being on one of these things when you’ve been in the place you’re getting oriented to for several months and actually work for one of the stops on the tour? (I know that one from personal experience.) These, needless to say, deserve to be given detail, so figure out what that detail looks like.

Then summarize as much as you can of the rest. It’s particularly easy in writing, when you can actually show the character’s eyes glazing over by going from the first few sentences of actual quote and word by word to a summary. Specific motivational pitches, bits of paperwork, whatever, give way to “and then a movie about [subject], and then a short speech about [subject], and the brochures piled up on the desk like leaves in fall.” The best part about the summarizing is that, when you introduce the thing that matters and start describing it with specifics rather than generalities, whether it’s a quote or a character or an incident or what, it’s going to stand out. Harder in a game? Well, yeah, here you’re having to balance out the length of exposition as well as everything else, since the players probably can’t just skim. Pre-write the unimportant parts.

Of course, on the summarized parts, you’re going to want to make every sentence count. If it doesn’t contribute to the context, if it’s just there to be part of the orientation, try to pare it down. Every sentence has to pull its weight, since the more sentences you have, the more likely you are to glaze people’s eyes rather than getting your point across.

Yes, there are very few things inherently more difficult to write well than a standard orientation. But if you can make it work, people will remember it.

Sometimes, there are people who just don’t realize they’ve gotten a message across, so they pick up a sledgehammer and pound it in, again and again ad infinitum, nauseum, etc, even to the point of the defenestration of the offending book, DVD, video… you get the idea. Such was the case with ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’.

I know there are some people who figure what I’m about to say is no big deal. And if you’re the kind of person who will watch anything with impressive cinematics, that keeps perfect track of the number of bullets in Chekhov’s gun, and that shows skill in making even fleeing for one’s life look downright badass, and think that kids’ movies should be cut slack because they’re kids’ movies, then you’ll probably enjoy the movie, but seriously, you’re reading the wrong review.

The problem with ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’? To put it simply, despite being a spectacularly 3D movie, it’s peopled entirely by cardboard cutouts whose basic characteristics are hammered in until you remember “the guy who” long after you forget what the names were. You can’t claim that they didn’t spend enough time on characterization, mind you, not when fully half the footage is these characters being “themselves”. What’s missing is effort.

Where to begin? You’ve got your main character, Flint, an inventor who seems to be about 75% style and 25% substance. And manages to hit every nerd stereotype in the book, one by one. I’d be fine if it was just the labcoat and the failed inventions. I liked the tendency to narrate his actions when he was doing much of anything in relative privacy (particularly when he lampshaded it). And I think that if they’d stopped at those, maybe added mildly awkward social interaction, they would’ve been fine. But, well, what they ended up with was someone whose entire characterization was Ridiculed Nerd Who Does Not Get People, not so much.

Then we get Sam, whose big schtick is stifling her inner nerd. (No, this isn’t a spoiler, it’s blatantly foreshadowed with, even around someone who is very obviously her kind, biting down on lines of jargon and substituting something generic and brainless, by the time the burgers start falling.) And the town’s darling, incapable of shutting up about his old role as a mascot—how many times does he do the cute pose and “Uh-oh?” Too many. And—in short, just about everyone repeatedly demonstrates their schticks, over and over, until it seems like they’re yelling their names whenever they walk onto the scene. The monkey can get away with it. The people cannot.

And the lessons and themes… well, let’s just say they hit with the approximate force of a bunch of hundred-pound grapes hurtling groundward at terminal velocity. Parent and child who don’t understand each other? Grape. Greed is bad? Grape that bounces a time or two, with a side of fat-mocking. Fame is transitory and not worth as much as you think? Grape. I’m sure you get the idea.

The problem, basically, is ham-handed exposition—making so much effort to drive the points in that even people who didn’t get it the first time feel patronized by the time the movie’s over. If you want a chance to study that sort of mistake, ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ is as good a way as any. If you don’t have the patience for it, though, watch another movie.

So there’s a story to be written, or a game to be plotted, or a blog to post… you get the idea. Sure, you’ve got time, but this is important. Which explains why, the closer you get to deadline, the more enticing other stuff is—and the more expected of you the thing you’re “supposed” to be doing is, the still more enticing the alternatives are.

The result? Something’s to be done in a week. Let’s call it having the numbers ready for your next game event; you’ve got some vague idea what happens, but you need to hammer it out. Day one—write a blog post. Then a few more; this one’s a really strong idea, and it gets it out of the way; more time for the game later! Maybe a few writing exercises with a friend would get me into the right mindset. And what about that other concept I had…. and oooh, friend sent me a new webcomic, I’m sure I’ll get an idea there. And on, and on. By the sixth day, we’ve drafted story ideas, created civilizations, cleaned our rooms, come up with four plans for another game complete with contingencies, gotten homework done…. and yet we’re no more ready than we were when we started. Pressure killed the idea, and now it’s just us and the deadline and one day to go.

It’s one of the biggest problems with things that we started out doing for fun, and ended up doing as social obligations or similar. Once we’ve got deadlines and extra work, it starts feeling like a chore; once it feels like a chore, it’s not as much fun; once it’s not as much fun, we don’t want to do it; once we don’t want to do it, we find ourselves something else to do; once we find ourselves something else to do, we’re lost until the deadline is on top of us.

For some people, the best workaround is just to buckle down and eliminate distractions. Turn off the computer and the cell phone, unplug the game system, maybe listen to music but only if it’s background noise and not being sorted for future game sessions, WE ARE GOING TO WORK NOW. Or find a place to work that doesn’t allow for most of the standard distractions, like a moving trolley.

Another short-term solution, at least for the people who aren’t very good at holding still, is pseudo-multitasking: doing something that takes up about half of the attention simultaneously with the project, on grounds that that’ll keep one from being completely distracted by something that requires the full attention (and as a side bonus, gives you something to think about aside from “Omigod my deadline’s coming what am I going to do?”). I used to do it a lot with IMs; carry on a conversation in one window, work on my work while waiting through the inevitable typelag from whoever I was talking with. Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone, the half-distraction might become a full distraction, and if the half-distraction requires another person, well, that person needs to be available to distract you.

For people with a little more time in which to finish, or ones who assigned a deadline just to get themselves to work, there’s another answer; create or accept a conflicting, more urgent deadline of another sort, thus making something else more in need of evasion and making the troublesome project something else that can be evaded to rather than evaded from. Asimov is said to have had multiple active typewriters, and flitted from one to another depending on which project he had ideas for; I’ve recently been experimenting with taking a break with one game to run another in hopes that I’ll be so pressured on the current one that avoidance pushes me to my primary. (It works. Mostly.)

And, if the thing that’s being done is optional but expected, there’s doing something else of the same sort and letting the stress sort itself out later. Like, well, writing about evasion behavior because figuring out where to start when talking about endings is getting a little overwhelming.

Don’t let the need to avoid the tough stuff ruin your ability to get things done; use the need against itself instead!