September 21st, 2017 – Cedar City, Utah
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Shawn Burnham of Cedar City, Utah, goes to Southern Utah University where she is majoring in English, her focus being on the creative writing track. Anyone who isn’t involved in the liberal arts will always ask why she’d major in that, and everyone who is involved in the liberal arts knows just how tricky that career path is. Though Shawn loved all the class she was taking, she always felt that she was going to be underprepared once she got out into the working world. You go to class, and that final letter grade is what motivates you to finish a short story or write a poem a week, but that’s not how the world functions. Without self-discipline, she claims, you’re going to fall apart as a writer. That’s why she set out to see if she had what it took to really work as a writer.
The goal was to take three months in the summer to fully commit to the life of a writer. Each week, she gave herself a writing prompt that would help her to explore all kinds of writing styles. Some of these prompts included only writing haikus for a week, only writing sestinas, only writing epitaphs, only writing pastorals, producing a comedy short story, producing a horror short story, producing a creative non-fiction piece, and many more. By the end of the summer, the young writer ended up with more than 30 new pieces of writing to her writer’s personal portfolio. She says that even if you don’t produce a masterpiece every time, there is never a wasted piece. Sometimes what you get from a piece is a single line that is gold, or you just learn that what did and didn’t work for you.
Learning was exactly Shawn’s goal. Which is why simply writing wasn’t enough, there had to be some form of reflection or documentation of the process. After she gave herself a prompt, that following Friday she’d post on her blog how that week had gone and what she learned. She says that doing this not only helps her to remember what she’s done, learned, and what’s worked for her, but it’s also a way for other young writers to learn from someone who is at the same level as them. Many already established authors have blogs, but Shawn says that those can be intimidating for young writers like herself. A lot of writers don’t have a lot of faith in themselves, and looking to writers who seemingly know what they’re doing could be discouraging to writers who are still fumbling around in the beginning of their career. This is why Shawn chose a blog to report her writing, she wanted to pioneer a place for beginning writers.
Shawn Burnham has since started her senior year of college and continues to write whenever she has down time from her classes. Although her blog hasn’t been updated since the end of the project, she continues to keep a private journal that tracks what’s working in her writing and what isn’t. There’s been no decision made yet on whether the blog will continue or not.
One Man's Blog is Another Man's Treasure
