About Me — Greg Beatty. I wouldn’t say I’ve always wanted to be…
By: Greg Beatty
Tags: Abour Me, Introduction, About Me

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I wouldn’t say I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

First I wanted to be a dinosaur.

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Then Captain America.

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Then a baseball player.

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Then an astronaut.

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But after that, long before I graduated high school, I wanted to be a writer.

There was only one problem with that. I grew up with a massive lack of self-confidence. It was truly immense. It’s not going too far to say it defined me.

Part of it was not knowing any writers. Writers were people who wrote these wonderful books and stories. They created hobbits and Ents and Wild Things and oobleck and the Mushroom Planet and Cats in Hats and Zero Stones and harlequins and houses that called out “Fire!” Writers were somewhere between nobles and an alien race. And I was not.

Most of it, though, was that lack of confidence as deep and dusty as the Valles Marineris. This canyon separated what I did from what I thought I could do. I took AP English, history, and math in high school. I took enough credits that I could have graduated by the middle of junior year, and it never occurred to me that I could have actually done anything that laid the foundation for becoming a writer. I wrote things once in a while, but didn’t serve on the staff of the literary magazine, the yearbook, the school newspaper, etc.

There was a continual, ongoing disconnect between my academic performance and my perception of myself in the world. I won multiple academic awards and scholarships…and dropped out of college due to a lack of vision. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, even though the professor who knew me best suggested I study English, because then I could do what I loved and was good at.

So I dropped out. I moved across the country, from Ohio to Seattle, and tried to find myself. I worked an array of jobs, including a memorable four hours of phone sales. I was a security guard, a waiter, a deckhand (and bartender) on charter boats, a massage therapist, and short stints as other, stranger things.

And at some point, as I was figuring out how to feed myself and which was up, I realized I wanted to be a writer. And I wanted it bad. The only problem was, my confidence didn’t match my desire. It was hard to put words out on the page, let alone out into the world. I filled a stack of paper notebooks as high as I am tall with my scribbles, and a lot of it was hard. I’d write like a page, just a page of random thoughts, and I’d be exhausted.

I read books and articles on how to write, and tried things. I slowly got better, and started submitting things for publication. Looking back now, I didn’t have nearly the hard road that other writers I’ve know had. Once I actually shifted over the hump from filling notebooks to actually writing recognizable pieces, I started publishing short stories. I still remember the first rejection, though: I curled up on my bed in a tight little ball. For a long time.

After a while, I decided formal education would help my writing. I went back to college, earning a bachelor’s in English with a creative writing emphasis. As part of a series of classes, I started a novel. I got about 240 pages into it…and stalled out. At first I thought I was just working on ideas to fill the gap in the middle of the book. Then I wasn’t. I was in a classic writer’s block, and it didn’t go away. I spent months grinding my gears, and eventually just stopped. In my 20s, without ever having made it, I became an ex-writer. Since this was my calling, in addition to being an ex-writer, I became a depressed failure.

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However… in some cases, being a weak-willed failure can work for you. Friends and teachers suggested I go to graduate school. I had never wanted to be a teacher, but I had nothing else going on, so I did. Earning a master’s and PhD in English meant I wrote a lot of papers. They were nonfiction, so I wasn’t blocked. To me, they weren’t real writing. However, to my writing muscles, they were. So I wrote and wrote and wrote, often writing on or about the sort of thing I wanted to write.

This kept my early longing to write (creatively) on life support, and all the writing and teaching I did gave it some teeth. As I said, I didn’t think I could be a real writer, but academic writing? Sure, I could help freshmen with that. This meant I did a ton of reading on the basics. How much? Before I taught my first college class, I read over 100 articles on teaching freshman English. Combine that with all the reading I’d done on my own about writing, and I was actually really well prepared.

Late in my doctoral program, my comatose desire to write woke back up for real. I attended Clarion West, a six week long intensive for aspiring professional science fiction writers. I had some great teachers, lots of great fellow students, and a blast. My desire to write revived with a vengeance. I also learned some other things along the way. The very first day the instructor gave an assignment to write a complete short story in no more than two pages. I scoffed. Wasn’t possible. And then I did it, and I liked it. Another instructor gave an assignment to write a story with as little narration as possible — just dialogue and minimal setting, like a play. I scoffed. Wasn’t possible. And then I did it, and I liked it.

I published both of those pieces, and had a huge head of steam for writing my own work. I had to finish my dissertation (on serial killer novels), and then surged into writing. I published dozens of short works: short stories, flash fiction, poems, essays, book reviews, interviews, and once again, stranger things (like jokes about cows). Along the way I learned some things about myself.

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One of these was that while I didn’t have a grand, multi-book vision like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, I continually exploded with ideas that work really well with shorter forms, like flash fiction and personal essays. I also have people and topics and things that I love, like dogs and cooking, and I can celebrate these things I love without having to crank out 1111 pages. I also learned that I can complete these shorter pieces fast enough to keep the darkness of eternal self-doubt from shutting me down. Or I shoot them off like fireworks, so they blaze for a moment against the dark. Ah!

And so, combining my best and worst qualities, I focus on the short form.

For a while I had to focus on nonfiction works that earned me money directly, like study guides to literary works. Recently, though, I’ve been carving time to republish some of my old stories on Amazon, write new fiction and personal essays, and yes, write some things for Medium.

Thanks for having me.