When people ask what I do for a living and I tell them I’m an editor/writer/copywriter/writer and editor (I vary it according to what I think will alarm/enrage/bore the person the least), they are usually politely baffled. ‘Oh, right,’ is a common response. ‘That sounds really interesting,’ is another (usually said in a tone that makes it clear they mean the exact opposite). Just occasionally, someone is direct enough to ask either, ‘Can you really make a living out of that?’ or ‘How on earth did you end up doing that?’ The answer to the first is, ‘Yes. Mostly. Usually. Well, okay, if we’re being honest, sometimes only just.’ The second is trickier. How on earth did I end up doing this?
I have not, for instance, always been one of those people who is infuriated by other people’s writing/mistakes/punctuation. I mean, I am close to being one of those people now, but that’s exposure for you. The truly born-to-it nit-pickers (some of whom really wouldn’t like that last hyphen) are, for one thing, better at proofreading than I am. Don’t get me wrong. I’m good at it. But I don’t live for it. The thing I’m good at, the thing people have always asked me to do, is the drafting things from scratch. I also have a strange ability to de-garbage other people’s writing. And a knack for turning stuff written by people for whom English is not a first language into stuff that’s a bit more idiomatic (though often without really being able to explain why I’ve done it the way I have, even to myself, let alone to them).
Over the years, through a series of jobs that didn’t necessarily involve much actual writing, I found myself volunteering to do the minutes, start a draft of something, have a look at someone’s report/application/website text. Never mind ‘If you build it’: volunteer to do a piece of writing once, finish it on time, and they will come, and then come back for more. Could you have a quick look through this? Would you be able to summarise that for us? By tomorrow? Yes, yes and thrice yes. Because what I enjoy isn’t the picking of nits. I don’t get a thrill out of telling people something is wrong. What I enjoy is making things clearer. A sharper message. A shorter sentence. Moving that bit up so that the point of the piece is at the beginning, not buried halfway through.
Enjoying an activity is one thing. Deciding to leave your proper job for it is quite another. For me, it happened via a piece of accidental networking. I’m not very good at the deliberate kind. It runs counter to some of the things I love most about writing (silence, for one). I contacted someone I’d run into via a work project and asked if she thought, from her experience, that there was any mileage in offering to write website text for the world she worked in. I thought she’d tell me that it wasn’t a thing, that people just did it themselves, or, if not, that they hired big, shiny design agencies to do it for them. Instead, she pretty much bit my hand off, saying she was looking for someone who could do exactly that (the writing, not the biting), right now.
And it went from there. Someone else got in touch with me. Was it true I would write text for people’s websites? Well, it was now. And then, someone else: if I wrote things, would I write a book about their organisation? Yes, I definitely would. I couldn’t really believe that people would pay me to do something I find so enjoyable. Lucky for me that so many people hate writing. Or that, even if they don’t hate it, they can’t find time for it alongside the billion other things their jobs demand of them.
It's been almost seven years since I started ‘Emerson Write’. I suppose it isn’t unusual to keep on enjoying something you have a semi-natural knack for. What is certainly out of the ordinary, and what is still a genuine, every-day-I’m-glad-I-did-this thrill, is being allowed to do that something for a living, under your own control, in your own space. So although I generally don’t generally go in for offering life advice, I would say this: if you’ve ever thought of going freelance, ask yourself what you have a knack for. What do people always ask you to do, because you’re good at it? Next (and this is crucial), ask yourself if you like doing that thing. If it’s ‘Yes,’ to both, then lucky you. You might just have found your way to a delicious chunk of autonomy.