Richard Charles Beckham II holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Antioch University Los Angeles. He's a graduate from the University of Washington with a degree in English, where he wrote articles for the school’s alternative newspaper The Weekly Enema. He's also one of the founding professional writers for the iTunes app, HOOKED, where his text message format pieces have over 600,000 reads, one of which was made into the short film "VAN." He has had his work featured in The Bookends Review's “Best of 2015 Anthology,” as well as Innovative Fiction Magazine, Metazen, Yesteryear Fiction, Dying Writers, Gold Man Review, with a poem published by Leaves of Ink. To learn more about Richard check his Facebook page or email him politely.
Aside from his prose, Richard has had a poem published by Leaves of Ink and a cartoon published by The Humor Times. He is also an oil painter whose work has appeared in restaurants, coffee shops, and galleries around Seattle where he lives with his wife and son. His paintings can be seen at: www.flickr.com/photos/rcb_2.
Currently, he is working on his most recent novels. Feel free to find out more about him at www.richardbeckham.com.
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Writing Restart
Eight years have passed since writing my last blog post. Back then, my son was an idea, not yet thought of realistically. He was just a name my wife and I thought up in Paris when I proposed to her, which was three years before we finally went through with the wedding, after finishing school … again. Suffice it to say a lot has changed since that last blog post. We had a child, re-homed our terrier, moved out of Federal Way, bought a house, got a poodle and then re-homed him, and had our lives forever changed by the pandemic. I began working from home for my day job, changed positions, and took a couple trips to the ER, once in the driver’s seat and once in the passenger seat — both times turned out to be nothing of concern, only wasted time, reassurance of our health and costly medical bills.
My previous blog, a “cringe” that pains me to read these days, now that I’m a more mature writer (at least by age), was the sort of young, inexperienced, quick writing. The kind that Strunk and White would describe as “breezy” in The Elements of Style. It’s the kind of writing that is self-aggrandizing, an instant turn-off for the reader, full of opinion and thought vomit. Essentially, it’s bad writing. I deleted that latest post and some older posts and drafts because I want my site to represent the writer I think I am now. Not what I pretended to be back when my desk was in the center of the room. The same with the two novels I published. I wish I could keep the remaining paperbacks in the box in my basement closet, just take them out of print entirely. But I can’t do that, or bring myself to do it. For one, my wife doesn’t want me to. For two, the email address I have on file with Ingram no longer exists, nor would I even know my password if I had the email.
Lesson Learned
So instead of publishing anything over the last eight years, I had my nose to the grindstone, working on many projects, fine-tuning my craft, my technique, my method. I believe I have evolved, learned a lot through trial and error and, most importantly, through rejection and the indifference of the literary world. I taught myself, studied, read, and unlearned what I learned during my MFA years. Or maybe I should say that I learned to step away from the forms and styles I experimented with getting my MFA: the forms and styles that got me nowhere.
I’ve also come to appreciate the typewriter — for first drafts, at least. Whereas before, for years, I would write my first drafts in pencil (thanks Hemingway). The idea being, as John Irving would agree, that writing by hand slows your writing down. That was the goal anyway. But my horrible scribble spewed out just as fast, if not faster, than I typed on a computer keyboard. No, typewriters are the way to go. It’s a guaranteed way to slow my writing down. Writing on a typewriter cannot be frantic or rushed because it’s too easy to mistype and eff up if you don’t concentrate. Plus it’s fun. There isn’t a writing experience like it.
All this is to say that this post should be considered an introduction to a new chapter on my website/blog. So, may the ink I type before the dawn bloom into something worth reading. Let it see the light of the day.
