Welcome to my writing portfolio.
Lauren Deidra Sawyer is a journalism and writing major at Indiana Wesleyan University. She loves to spend her time reading, writing and catching up with friends. Lauren wants to start her own literary magazine one day.
One of my first short stories was also my most scandalous. I remember sitting in the living room with my Mom, cutting up a JC Penny catalogue to illustrate my narrative. It was called "Jenny's Story" and it followed a single thirtysomething who went to dinner for a blind date just nine months before giving birth to three kids. I believe I referred to their first night together as "really good."
Since then, I have never stopped writing. In seventh and eighth grade I wrote two young adult novels (each only about 100 pages) and started blogging early in high school. I have taken several advanced writing courses both in high school and college.
The greatest writing advice I've ever received was from my AP English teacher my senior year of high school. She said to take risks - even if you fail. You will always be rewarded someway or another by avoiding the mundane. So that's what I've been doing. I've been taking risks, sometimes to the point of embarrassment or failure, but to me it's worth it. My writing is unique; I hope this portfolio exemplifies it.
"My own conviction is that the poetry is far the deepest in us and that the prose is only broken-down poetry; and likewise that to this our lives correspond. ... As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their own lives and those of others." George MacDonald