Thesis? What thesis!?

Questions to consider if you don’t have your life-narrative thesis statement:

Where does your mind go when you are not doing your work?

What possibilities keep recurring to you?

Who or what do you admire?

Psst: feel free to borrow from fiction! Some of my heroes and role models are real people I’ve met or read about, but some of them are comic-book or cartoon characters because myth is real and serves a real purpose for helping us draw inspiration and for drawing people from different backgrounds around the same cultural campfires.

What can’t you stand? What wrongs would you like to right?

What sort of experiences do you have that make you forget about anything else?

And now take any of those answers to the above five questions and ask:

Why? So what? What would you like to do about it?

My advice: Your story is probably best written around what you care about. No one likes hearing you phone in someone else’s story. You have passions, and now you have to put them to work.

Back to Advising or back to Writing Your Narrative