How to choose a subject for an article about your own experience

Choose a subject you know from the inside: a decision you made, a practice you kept up for years, a project you saw through. A quick test is whether you could talk about it for twenty minutes without notes. If you could, you already have the stories, numbers, and turning points an article needs. Then write the subject as one specific sentence, the way you would say it to a friend.

Why does the subject matter so much?

Mind Pencil does not research your topic or invent material. An AI interviewer asks you one question at a time, follows up on what you just said, and the article is written from the transcript of that conversation. The article can only be as specific as your answers, so the subject has to be one where you are the best available source.

What is the twenty-minute test?

Ask yourself whether you could talk about the subject for twenty minutes without looking anything up. The interview itself is not timed at twenty minutes; answers stay open for a week from your first one. The test is about depth. A subject you can sustain for that long almost always contains the concrete details that make writing worth reading: what happened, what it cost, what you would do differently.

Which subjects make good articles?

• A decision and what it cost you: leaving a stable job, closing a shop, moving a family abroad.
• Something you practiced for years: teaching a class, running a kitchen, managing a sales team.
• A project that nearly failed, and the moment it turned around.
• A change you watched happen in your field, from close enough to see the details.
• An idea you keep returning to, and the experiences that keep bringing you back.

Which subjects tend to fall flat?

• Topics you would have to research first. If most of your answers would be "I would need to look that up," the article ends up as a summary of other people's work.
• Subjects that are too broad. "Leadership" is hard to interview about. "The week I had to lay off half my team" is not.
• Someone else's story that you only know secondhand.
• A list of tips. Tips without the experience behind them read like every other post on the subject.

How narrow should the subject be?

Narrower than feels comfortable. Start with the broad theme and keep adding the specifics only you can supply: "Management" becomes "Managing a remote team," which becomes "What two years of running a remote team taught me about trust." The last version gives the interviewer a situation, a time span, and a tension to explore, and it gives readers a reason to click.

How should I phrase the topic?

Write it as one sentence in your own voice, ideally with a tension or a turn in it. The topic is the starting point for the first question, so a clear sentence leads to a sharper opening. Some examples:

• "Why I left a stable job to open a ceramics studio."
• "What ten years of teaching taught me about attention."
• "The product launch that almost failed, and the call that saved it."

What if I have several ideas?

Pick one. Each interview produces one article on one topic, and the article is stronger when the conversation stays on a single thread. The other ideas can each become their own interview.

A checklist before you start

• You lived it, or saw it up close.
• You can name at least two specific moments, numbers, or people involved.
• It fits in one sentence.
• There is something at stake: a cost, a risk, a lesson, a change of mind.

You are the source. The interview's job is to get the source talking.