The Judge

Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts —

The Exercise —

Break your story idea down into three sentences of three words each. That will give you a beginning, a middle, and an end, and help you understand the architecture of the work. By having to choose three verbs, you’ll be forcing yourself to consider the three parts of the action.

The Objective —

To see if your story, like a good stool, has three legs to stand on.

Judge the judge

help improve practice

learned measurement plan

The Judge was named Judge by her parents and took that as a calling to go to law school and then become a judge. She didn’t know any other women with her name, and no one in her family had the name. Her parents never told her that they thought the law was the career she should enter, either.

In law school, she wasn’t sure she would continue, as she didn’t care for all the time she would need to spend in the law library. To help her improve her practice, she hired a paralegal, who loved the law library and would help grow her practice.

Years later, when she interviewed for a judge position, she told them how she had learned a measurement plan to support her becoming a judge. As she explained her plan, the committee was sold on her becoming the next judge in their state.

To this day, Judge is a judge of a state court and enjoys going to work every day.

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First published by Mercury Press on medium.com