I started freelancing in 1995, because I had to: My silliest sister played me some music she’d written that made me think she was about to break the music world wide open, so I had to get my ass in gear and succeed.
My main skill is spotting errors in printed text. Any and all kinds of errors. And I had been trained in proofreading, which — contrary to popular belief — is not what editors mostly do. But in that proofreading training I had realized that I had a skill that most of the authors I was proofing didn’t have: I could take a passive sentence and wrangle it into active form, quickly. And I could replace any ill-chosen terms — “reticent” when you mean “reluctant”, for example — at lightning speed.
So I styled myself a freelance copyeditor, drafted up a super one-page “Hire Me” resume, and faxed it to every publisher in Fort Worth.
One of them called me, brought me in for a test, and hired me. And when you edit copy for a publisher of niche magazines, you get to know what they need pretty quickly. So when they asked me to write, bob’s your uncle!
I’ve been editing and writing ever since. Freelance. It’s gone from fax to e-mailed Word attachments and to my buying Adobe and InDesign to meet my clients’ needs, but that’s just a benison. Now I’m teaching myself to really use them, so that I can design and edit text.
When people ask me how I got my start in this or in voice acting, which I also do professionally, I say, “Wanted to.”