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If you’ve got some writing savvy (read: If you graduated with an Arts degree), working from your computer is entirely possible, and sometimes really rewarding. The difficulty is finding the jobs and patching together revenue streams to make enough money at it. The best bit of freelancing advice I ever got was on the forums at matador.com when I was in Taiwan and fancied myself a travel writer. The person who gave this advice was the co-creator of the website, and he prefaced it by saying “this is what I do whenever I’m travelling and I run out of money -”
Here it is *drumroll*. Go on Craigslist for every major city in every English speaking country and got to “writing/editing jobs”. If you search through enough postings, you’ll find something really great that others might not have picked up on.
After exhausting other avenues (elance.com, associatedcontent and a handful of others) I tried it out. It definitely didn’t pay off right away. I sent dozens of emails for a diverse slew of jobs and got only a few responses. Eventually I found a posting for a position as a proofreader/editor for essays. It was more than six months before I got my first job (due to computer lags and the advent of the off-season for essay editing). Now I’m editing several letters and essays a week, and actually getting paid to do it.
Today I was particularly excited. I read through a grammatically abominable letter only to discover that it was written and signed by the Minister for the Department of __________, in the Asian country of __________. I know that it is only a bizarre loophole of globalization that I am granted the responsibility of clarifying and finalizing his words in English, and that it is possible he didn’t even dictate the letter and someone in his office wrote it, but I feel strangely touched to know that I’m somehow involved in the daily work of the leader of a country. Cool.
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