If you’re wondering what a thesis meeting looks like, here’s a bit of the process.

1) You go to your zen place and you write. I like to write in my family room that is covered in candles or in my office area where I have a dancing baby Groot from the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. I like to have fun little toys in my work space so I can get a little distracted, but not enough so as that I don’t write.

2) You turn in pages to your advisor and he or she takes a few weeks to read the pages and make comments. I always email my pages in addition to printing up a hard copy and delivering it to my advisor. Ask what he or she prefers in terms of font size and type.

3) Your advisor contacts you and the two of you find a date and time that work for both of you to speak.

4) You meet your advisor. The meeting lasts anywhere from an hour to five hours. I don’t think any of my meetings have lasted fewer than three hours. My advisor is Ann Hemenway. She’s great! Our meetings usually start with a bit of catching up. You get really close with your advisor, so you both want to do a little bit of talking about where you are at, what you’ve been doing work-wise, school-wise, life-wise, and then you start talking about the work. I can’t wait to tell Ann about my recent storytelling experiences. Below is a photo of me at You’re Being Ridiculous’ show during the Fillet of Solo event on January 17th.

5) When you talk about your work, I always have a copy for yourself on which to take notes. I sometimes print out a full copy of the work or just the pages I turned in. My thesis just hit 400 pages, so I’m not turning in work again until the whole book is done. Make sure to make meticulous notes. Ann tells me what she likes, what is really working, what is confusing, what she doesn’t think is working, and what she has questions about. She tells me what she thinks I should cut, what parts she thinks are long-winded, where she thinks I can expand, etc. My manuscript comes away colored in ink from various pens.

6) Go home and push forward. I take the tactic of knowing what changes I will make and keeping those in my head as I push forward with writing. I wait to revise until later.

7) Write about 50-100 pages—try to make a big chunk—and repeat the process.