100 Words of Writing Advice from Amanda Fields, Senior Editor

“I’m the worst with writing advice. A masochist, at best. Hard on myself. Critical. But I do, maybe, have some advice: be slow and deliberate. Let ideas stew. Nobody’s waiting! You’re waiting for yourself to connect disparate threads. The result might be gorgeously horrific or inspiring, whatever your purpose. Give yourself that time to think, walk, reflect. “First thought best thought’s” a misnomer. Pen to paper was never your first thought. You’ve been thinking this whole time, and then something emerges, and you turn it this way and that, like a gem. Please observe how it sparkles. It’s an offering.”

– Amanda Fields, Senior Editor at Literary Mama

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Amanda Fields is an Assistant Professor of English and the Writing Center director at Central Connecticut State University and Senior Editor of Literary Mama. She co-edited My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (The Experiment, 2019) and Toward, Around, and Away from Tahrir: Tracking Emerging Expressions of Egyptian Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). She has published in creative and scholarly venues, including Indiana Review, Brevity, So to Speak: Language + Feminism + Art, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy.