AKA: How a Three-Word Sentence Became Judgement
Every writer has an origin story. Some are dramatic – a dream at 3 a.m., a conversation overheard on a commuter train, a headline that stops them cold. Mine is quieter than any of those. Judgement began with an unfinished sentence and a small piece of psychology.
I was doing a writing course and looking for a way to push past the blank page. The technique the course gave me was disarmingly simple. You’re handed three words – the beginning of a sentence – and without pausing to think, you write whatever your brain produces next. No genre. No context. No guardrails. Just the raw, unfiltered thing your mind reaches for.
Try it now. Blank your mind. Then complete this sentence: “Susan said that…”
You did it without thinking, didn’t you?
When I tried the exercise, my brain gave me this: “Susan said that it always rained on Thursdays.”
Strip away the first three words, and you’re left with something strange and oddly melancholy. It always rained on Thursdays. I sat back and looked at it. And then, without warning, a picture arrived.
A young woman, face tilted upward toward the rain. Implants glowing lilac beneath her skin, arcing from her temples, over her ears, down the back of her neck – Colours, they were called. She stood inside a vast generation ship, gazing up through an enormous viewport at a ruined Earth below. Cloud-choked. Flickering with the light of fires burning through the murk.
That image – that one sentence cracking open into a world – is the moment Judgement began.
As the story developed, the woman became a man: Martal Strand. The generation ship became an O’Neill cylinder, ELLE4, orbiting a plague-ravaged planet smothered in impact winter. And three questions started doing the real work of building the novel: What if? Why? And so what?
What if humanity had survived catastrophe aboard an orbital habitat? Why would anyone in that habitat choose to threaten it? And what would happen if a loving father discovered that threat?
The answers became Judgement.
I come back to this story whenever the blank page feels impossible. You don’t need a grand idea or a lightning-bolt moment. Sometimes all you need is three words, an ellipsis, and the willingness to write down whatever comes next – even if it surprises you.
Especially if it surprises you.
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