I don't write much here about the work, partly because it's quiet and partly because describing it well would give away how much I enjoy a thing most people find unbearable.
I copyedit, from home, part-time. Other people's sentences come to me and I tidy them. That's the phrase I use when it comes up, the sentences I tidy for a living, and it's accurate but it undersells the oddness of the job, which is that I spend my days inside the way other people think, one clause at a time, closer to their writing than they are themselves.
You learn a writer fast. Three pages in and I know their tics, the small involuntary things they do without noticing, the way you know a friend's laugh before the joke lands. One writer I work with cannot commit to a single thing he says. Every sentence comes hedged, padded round with a perhaps or a it could be argued or a in some sense, as if a plain claim left out in the open might be taken from him. I cut most of the hedges. The sentence underneath is nearly always braver than he let it be, and he meant the brave thing, he just couldn't bear to be caught meaning it. He's never once noticed. I think the qualifiers are where his nerve goes to hide, and my job is to give him back the spine he wrote and then flinched from. He thinks I barely touch his prose. I touch almost every line.
(I have my own tics. Of course I do. Everyone who corrects sentences for a living is sitting on a private list of the things they themselves overdo, kept quiet out of professional embarrassment. I won't tell you mine. You'd start seeing them, and so would I, and then I'd have to do something about it.)
There was a sentence last week. A good writer, a real one, but she'd built a sentence that ran forty words to a place it didn't need to go, and buried in the middle of it was the actual thing, the line the whole paragraph was for, suffocating under the throat-clearing on either side. I cut the front, cut the back, and moved the buried line to the end where it could land, and changed nothing else. Same words, near enough. Just the order, and the air around them. The sentence went from something you'd read past to something that stopped you. She wrote back to say the paragraph felt much stronger now and she couldn't see what I'd done. That's the whole job, that sentence. The not being able to see what I'd done.
I'm not going to pretend it's important work. Nobody's life is saved. But there's a deep and slightly secret pleasure in making a sentence do quietly what it was trying to do loudly, and then taking my hands off it so it looks like it was always that way. I get to be good at one small thing in private. After a day of it I close the laptop and put the notebook in the drawer, and I read for myself in the evening with the part of my brain that does this switched off, mostly, except for the times it won't.