Thou Shalt Not Judge (Except When it Makes for a Good Story)

Usually, it's not nice to pass judgment on people. You could always be right, of course, but that little bit of victory doesn't warrant jumping to conclusions and probably hurting the one judged.

However.

If you can jump to conclusions without actually jumping to conclusions—form hypotheses without assuming they actually apply—you can end up with some good story material. And the farther you go (or the more ridiculous, depending on your writing specialty), the better.

Let's say you're on your way to work/school, and as you pass the local running track, you catch a glance of a young woman. She's suitably fit and in what you consider to be normal morning running clothes, but she is currently sitting on a bench at the side of the track, sipping from a Starbucks cup. The first assumption you have is that she has either been out running or is getting ready to run. That doesn't explain the whole situation, though.

First, let's say it would be no one would go running with a full cup of hot coffee/whatever on earth else she's drinking from Starbucks. From there, we can take two basic routes.

One, she has not been running with a full cup of Starbucks and is drinking it before she hits the track. Makes sense—but why is she having her morning caffeine on an otherwise empty park bench? Maybe she's just enjoying the morning. Maybe she's pretending to just enjoy the morning. Maybe that other space on the bench had been taken up by her boyfriend, who then left her in both senses of the word. In fact, she doesn't have a habit of drinking coffee—she just left the bench to grab something bready and something sweet to drink to calm her buzzing mind, and she couldn't stand to stay around all of the people in that Starbucks when she's barely able to keep herself from crying. There aren't too many people that pass this way, certainly not many that would pay any attention, so she came back here, to a spot that she can no longer say is her favourite place to run.

Two, the cup is empty. She drank it before she started running, and there aren't any convenient disposal spots along the track, so she had yet to get rid of it when she caught a glance of her best, best friend from high school who stole her boyfriend and, just a few months ago, her job. Said best, best friend is leaving the tennis court in the middle of the running track, and the jogger was on route to run into her. Instead she decided to park it on a bench, pretending to drink some coffee so no one passing by suspects anything, until the best, best friend was gone. If they ran into each other again, the jogger would probably end up beating the crap out of her. That would not be a good thing to repeat.

But perhaps we're not interested in writing high school dramas. Luckily, as you pass the track and turn a corner, you see two men putting up a section of fence: one, who doesn't particularly stand out, squatting to hold the bottom down as another, topless and wearing bright orange pants, drives in some nails. It looks like something a prisoner would wear. But what is he doing in the street, if he is indeed an escaped prisoner? Did he have help? Did one of his helpers sustain a wound that required a little cloth to bind? How did he get out of that one?

Any normal human being would take note of such things, maybe find it odd, but shrug it off and keep moving. Writers, on the other hand, can keep chasing the most insignificant character on the side of the road—not with the car, hopefully, but with crazy trains of thought veering off to wild conclusions worth reading. Just try not to get anybody hurt.