Ev BogueThe rebirth of publishing (more e-books are being sold in the world now than physical books) has led to amazing opportunities for writers everywhere. There has never been as many opportunities as there are now to make a full-time living from your written creations.
The largest challenge for writers everywhere is learning to write well enough to stand out above the noise.
Most writers aren't able to do this, but you can learn with practice.
I've made a full time living from writing for over a year now.
I hope that I can share my on-going experience learning to write better, perhaps it will help you bring your own writing to a professional level within space/time.
Origins
I began treating writing as a serious pursuit when I was a teenager over 10 years ago. I didn't go to school, and so had very little guidance (I believe this was a good thing.) I published short essays on a blog network that some grad students from Montana had set up called Catharsis.org. I had found the site via intuition/randomness and so was the only teenager writing on the site. The grad students would email and say things like "Ev, your writing is amazing but your grammar is crap. Here, fix this."
I was coached in small ways by random strangers on the Net initially. I only partially listened to their advice, I believe that editors tend to 'dumb down' work. There's a fine line between good grammar and good expression. I choose/chose to walk that line then/now.
Education
I went to journalism school at NYU (also majored in dance), but I was a terrible student. My writing had a tendency to really bother my teachers "you'll never get a job at a newspaper writing this way! Use the formula!" Teachers at Journalism school tend to be people who can't get jobs at newspapers, so I took that with a grain of salt. Now no one gets jobs at newspapers.
Instead, my girlfriend at the time S., who was also a journalism student would edit my work. "Ev, this is great, but your grammar is terrible. Let me fix it." Ditto the line between proper grammar and good expression, we walked that together.
I learned more about writing from my dance education than in writing classes.
I continued to blog online during college, mostly writing about feelings and experiences -- things you weren't allowed to be a professional writer doing according to my teachers. Heh.
During college I wrote briefly for Gawker's blog network. I learned how to write catchy headlines there. One time, I had to stay up to wait for the Pope to die one night at S.'s apartment on the Upper East Side. The Pope did not die.
Working at a desk
After college I worked at New York Magazine as a photo editor for their blog network. Early on one amazing editor who left after the first year of the startup would assign me to experience events, like 500-person pillow fights and that time I ran 54 blocks when a small airplane crashed into a skyscraper in Manhattan.
I'd usually co-photograph/write about these events. After the editor in question left, no one would let me write at the magazine. I learned mostly from the editors by being in the same room as them -- watching as they all collectively dumbed-down each other's work until it was palatable by a large audience of celebrity gossip hungry stupid people.
I vowed to write the opposite way and never report to editors again. My editing is now crowd sourced by people tweeting "Ev, this is really great, but your grammar is crap. Here fix this."
Learning flow
The biggest leap in my ability to write came in the summer before I left to New York Magazine. I'd just split up with an angel of destruction/creation who left to wander the globe in with $25 in her pocket and a guitar. I was incredibly confused about what happened.
I'd simultaneously become disillusioned with my desk at Nymag.
I began leaving the office promptly at 4:56pm and biking across the Williamsburg bridge, where I'd sip coffee next an 86 year old lady, Lenora, on Bedford Avenue and write in a Moleskine. I did this almost every day from 5:30, until the sun set. Then I'd head back to The Schoolhouse where we'd have grand adventures, throw parties, and generally explored each others worlds.
In Ray Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing, he tells the story about how he wrote Fahrenheit 451. He'd been unable to get any writing done at his home, because he had a few young children who wouldn't stop screaming. So, he went to the library to write. The library had typewriters that let you write for 10 minutes when you put in a dime. Ray was struggling with the money at the time, and had to feed his family, so he didn't have many dimes. He'd pop in the dime and then frantically type for 10 minutes. In-between, he'd walk around the library.
When you write incredibly quickly, it induces a flow state, which taps into your unconscious mind. I began doing this with the Moleskine on the summer bench. What I wrote when I was flowing surprised the crap out of me. After the summer was over, I'd learned how to tap into the flow state on command.
You cannot edit yourself and be in a state of flow simultaneously. Flow first, then edit. Then press publish.
At that point, most of my writing was channeled unconsciously from my experiences in New York. The more I experienced the world, the better my writing became. This is still true.
The collective
I believe that ideas do not come from one person, instead they're developed by a collective. The reason that my writing stays fresh is because I'm following a small but diverse group of people around the world who are working a very specific edge of human evolution. We're experimenting with dimensional language and many of us use Path together now.
In many ways, the deeper I go with this collective, the less the ideas actually need or do come from me. I'm a vessel through which their work/experience is channeled. Many of them write as well, we work different angles. The more we write, the farther we can take this edge.
My own experiences are part of this collective, so the more I explore the world the more successful we all are.
Becoming a pro
I began to write professionally after I quit my job at Nymag.com in July 2009 and hopped on an airplane to Portland Oregon with all of my stuff in a bag. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life, so I did two things. I installed blog software on Far Beyond The Stars (a blog that is now dead) and simultaneously got on Twitter. This is where I met most of the people I'm now in the collective with.
I wrote about my experiences. G.B. calls this experience telling. I lived with 97, 67, and then 47 personal possessions. This was kind of odd to be doing at the time, so I wrote about how freeing it was to not have to worry about stuff. People came to read because the writing was pushing an edge within society that very few people were willing to experience.
Many people emailed me saying I was crazy to get rid of all of my stuff. This seems silly now, as everyone is doing it. Back then, it was pretty revolutionary. There were only 5 people blogging about minimalism when my first e-book came out.
It's usually a good sign that your writing is going to be successful when 50/50 people think you're brilliant/insane.
I wrote an e-book which was published in February 2010, called The Art of Being Minimalist (out of print), which showed through experiences how to become a minimalist.
Now practically everyone is a minimalist, so that is no longer an edge people will pay for. I pulled the book off the market in early Feb 2011.
In March 2010, I wrote a free e-book called How to Create a Movement, based on my experience watching the audience grow from 0 to 50,000 readers per month in a very short time.
I wrote my second book, Minimalist Business, which came out in May 2010. It still shows, from my experiences, how to create a zero-overhead online business that runs itself.
Minimalist Business has sold many more copies than my other two e-books, because business books like this are incredibly valuable. I recently re-read the e-book, many people would still benefit from reading it. The book costs much less than business school, and I believe teaches you something that you'd never learn in business school.
Dimensional language and the future of writing
I'm beginning to write in a dimensional language that our collective is developing. Augmented Humanity flows in and out of this dimensional language in an attempt to teach it to you. People who don't read in dimensional tend to miss out on a lot of the data.
There are very few editors who can edit in dimensional language, so I tend to have to ignore editors at this point in time. They will catch up, but it will take awhile -- we will be far ahead of them again by the time they reach this point.
Dimensional language is kind of like Sanskrit, but instead of facilitating a vibrational transfer it facilitates an intuitive transfer.
This post is written mostly in English, so that more people can understand it. This is why the post has so many words.
In order to grasp the fullness of dimensional language, you need a practice. Yoga, Kung Fu, Qigong. You have to learn how to breathe and use the Internet to dive deep into work/understanding.