I get asked this question more often than I get asked nearly anything else about the literary life. So here I am, answering it!

Turn yer clock back not just an hour, but about twenty years. If you’re a millennial, start now! If you’re in your mid-fifties like me, it’s not too late, but we all have our work cut out for us. I’ll tell you how to do that in a bit.

I’ve always manipulated text. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been messing about with thought and speech bubbles in romance comics. The image above is from a love comic colouring book I made for my sister and my cousin one Xmas four hundred years ago. If you’re a reader of this blog, you know we’ve been collecting them for over forty years. One of our best accomplishments was buying blank white Froot O’ The Loom t-shirts (or however you spell that name; this editor doesn’t feel like fact checking today), painting glorious images from romance comics on them, changing all the words to make them personal, and passing them out at Xmas.

One of my current projects is a RILLY ODD writing experiment where I describe the action of a love comic story as it is, and then add my own interpretations to it: what the characters are actually thinking. I then write the story that continues after the story has ended. It’s a fun project that combines my love of writing and my life-long love of romance comics.

I like to think that doing all that early in my life (and continuing to do so) somehow shaped the idea of manipulating text as some kind of life choice in the future. But I’d be lying if I said I was aware of that at the time. Nope. I was just having fun like any kid.

There is a book in me about love comics. I know it with absolute certainty. I’m just not sure what shape it will take.

In the meantime, I edit books. But how did I get here? Editing is not a get-rich-quick scheme, although there can be good money in it once you have a track record for excellence and people start to notice what you’re doing. I started with two writing groups: one while I was at the University of Alberta in the mid-nineties, and another when I moved back to Red Deer after getting my degree. I worked on many individual pieces and full-length book projects in those two groups, and they taught me how to work generously and respectfully on other people’s writing.

In about 2011, I was reading an issue of filling Station magazine and saw a poem or two that I loved immediately. I contacted the author and told him how much I had enjoyed his work. I asked if there was more. I don’t recall now exactly how it came to be, but I found myself reading and editing the entire manuscript.

I did that for free, because I already knew I wanted to explore this career path, but I also knew no one would hire me without any real-world experience. That manuscript went on to win the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was published as part of the prize pack. I looked at several other full-length manuscripts over the next couple of years, always at my instigation and for free. I needed cred and that seemed the best way to get it. Looking back, it was the best way and I wouldn’t change it.

Building a little portfolio on a now-defunct website in about 2012 was my first step into announcing that I could do this work and that maybe people could hire me now. Enter Thistledown Press. I’m forever grateful to them as they hired me to do my first substantive edit (which OF COURSE I wish I could go back and do again) and three copy edits. By 2013, I had four legit editing jobs on my CV, plus all the reading I had done for friends and colleagues, some of which had gone on to publication.

What I learned later was that editors and publishing people talk. Of course they do, and I know that now. I put myself out there all the time, looking for books to evaluate. I was still doing the odd freebie for select people to build up my portfolio. The great thing about portfolios is that you don’t have to say whether you got paid to do it. The important bit (for presses and private clients looking to hire) is that the book I worked on was published by a reputable press, and if it went on to award notice, all the better.

Thistledown continued to throw work my way when they could, I was hired by Turnstone (the publisher of my first four books, and for that, I’m grateful as well), and my new publisher, the University of Alberta Press, started to take note of what I was doing. I was asked to evaluate a manuscript, and on the strength of that, I was hired to do the substantive edit on it.

Since then, I’ve edited three more books for them at one level or another and have contributed to many other UAP books as a friendly reader/manuscript evaluator.

That was the jackpot, kids! Some of the work I’m most proud of has come to me through UAP. I edited a book that was just up for a GG award for non-fiction, and I collaborated on the first book of short stories by an Inuk writer to be published in Canada.

In the last couple of years, I’ve also edited books for Radiant, Wolsak&Wynn, Turnstone, and Arsenal Pulp. And it’s been one of two things: in some cases, the press contacted me, and in others, it was me popping an informal note to someone I know at the press and asking if they had any editing they needed done. All presses need editors. Some keep the work in-house, but a lot hire freelance editors. I just asked.

But I waited until I had the credentials before I did that. Of course, not everyone says yes, but enough do that I can contribute meaningfully to the finances of my household.

In late 2017, I took the Editors’ Association of Canada’s Copy Editing Certification test.

I failed.

But I wasn’t upset about it. The grading took longer than usual for me, because the exams that come in just on the cusp of a passing grade (80%) need to be reviewed by a third reviewer after the first two have disagreed as to whether the test was a pass or a fail. So I know I didn’t fail by much, though they don’t reveal what your final percentage was.

When you register for that exam (which ain’t cheap, and rightly so), you have the option to purchase a practice test, which I did. I worked my way through it and FAILED SPECTACULARLY. I studied more. I read the entire Chicago Manual of Style. I read and did the exercises in the Meeting Editorial Standards self-test books. I won some and lost some. I edited more books for presses and private clients. I wrote the practice test again. The second time I did very well.

I’ve never had exam anxiety so it was fine for me to walk into some tech business on a winter Saturday in Edmonton and do my best on an unfamiliar computer and keyboard for three hours. I had no expectations, and so I wasn’t disappointed when I didn't pass. The invigilator stressed ahead of time that only 30% of the people who write the exam pass it. I knew the odds. And I was pleased with my showing. I recognized that the test did not say I was a bad editor. It said that I missed the mark on several questions. Okay by me. That’s life.

When the results letter arrived, I was in BC, helping my sister and my dad to help my stepmom let go and allow herself to stop suffering from cancer. My husband called me from home and asked if he should let me know my results. When he said I’d failed, I said, “I’m more than passing the test of what I’m doing right now, so that failure doesn’t matter in the least.”

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Lemme tellya on a happy note: that study period and those practice exams were the best professional development I have ever done in my entire life, for anything.

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The EAC recommends not taking the tests unless you have at least five years of related editing under your belt. So, how to get that? Turn back that clock and see what you’ve edited, no matter how informally, or how gratis the work was. Have you worked in any way on books that have gone on to be published? Did a poem you worked on in a writers’ group find its way onto a small shortlist?

Add this stuff up, my dudes. Make a portfolio (it’s easy here on squarespace, but I’m betting most website platforms these days make it easy to do so). Ask the authors you’ve worked with to write you a two-sentence endorsement about how groovy you are. You don’t have to say you didn’t get paid. Results are what matter to people and to presses looking to hire editors.

Go see your local writer-in-residence and ask them how they got to where they are. Join your provincial writers’ guild. Join the Editors’ Association of Canada even if you’ve never edited a book in your life.

And I most fervently recommend taking courses: whatever courses you can find and afford. Search your local college or university’s course listings, and take a continuing education course about editing. Take a creative writing class or two.

I offer a course here about how to edit your own work. Feedback from those who’ve completed it says that not only does my course help students work through their own writing, but it also gives them confidence to edit the work of others.

Whatever your path, go backwards for a while, and see where you dropped the bread crumbs of what could become your career in the future. Pick those up, make a portfolio, and don’t rest. Keep moving. As Robert Kroestch used to say to me, “Keep showing up.”

"How did you become an editor, Mizz Beach?”