Everything I Know About Writing I Learned by Publishing a Zine

by Jeff Somers

Aside from a relatively brief period in my childhood when I wanted to be a brain surgeon,¹ I’ve always wanted to be a writer, creating stories and convincing people to pay me for them.² As I got close to graduating college, I slowly began to realize that at some point I’d have to actually do something about becoming a writer in a professional sense.³ I’d submitted some short stories with little to show for it, and my efforts to publish my early (terrible, embarrassing) novels had yielded a few scammy vanity press responses but none of the “newly discovered genius” vibe I’d been expecting.⁴

One day, I had a conversation with a friend who was (and is) much smarter than me, and he suggested I just publish myself. In fact, he said, why didn’t we just put out our own magazine? The idea snowballed fast, and soon we’d recruited two other friends and had big plans to publish a provocative, politically charged magazine that would feature my fiction.

The snowball then melted just as fast, and a few years later I was the only one left with any interest in pursuing the project. I took all the material I’d already written, added some more nonfiction that was essentially me pouring my intrusive thoughts onto a page, and I published the first issue of The Inner Swine in May of 1995. I sent a copy to everyone I knew in the hope that someone would care.⁵

I published The Inner Swine for eighteen years—a total of sixty-six issues. It was 16 8.5×11 sheets of paper folded in half and saddle stapled with a cardstock cover⁶; each issue was about sixty-four pages, or 25,000 words—almost all of it written by me.

At the height of my zine empire, I was shipping out about 2,000 issues all over the world four times a year,⁷ and each issue was hand-folded, stapled, and stuffed into an envelope by Yours Truly, a man who clearly had no concept of how short life truly is.⁸ I lost money on every issue because I was and remain math-challenged.

Ask Me About My Super Cool Stapler

I started publishing a zine before I’d sold a single piece of fiction, and long before I made a living as a freelance writer. These things are connected: The experience of publishing a zine made me into the writer I am today.

I’d never heard of zines and had no idea there was a thriving underground community of zine publishers. I just thought it was incredibly exciting that I could just write whatever came into my head—fiction, autofiction, nonfiction, gibberish⁹—and then photocopy it and mail it out to people (this was when the Internet was still in its infancy, so print was The Way). That lack of preconceived rules or notions of what was allowed was incredibly exciting—I wasn’t writing to specs, or guidelines, or for a market. I was writing for myself and then throwing that stuff out into the world to see if there were any other weirdos like me out there.¹⁰

And yes, some of that material wasn’t great, and there are plenty of articles from the zine that I’m happy are lost to time. But I’m glad I wrote them, because I learned everything about being a writer—in both the professional and artistic sense—from publishing that zine four times a year when no one knew who I was.¹¹

I learned pitching. Because I am insane and slightly stupid, I approached my self-published zine that no one cared about as if it was a life-or-death situation, as if my pets or siblings would be brutally murdered if I missed a deadline, so I came up with 25,000 words of material four times a year without fail. When I launched a career as a freelance writer,¹² I was able to slide into the role effortlessly because I’d spent eighteen years pitching ideas. Sure, I was pitching those ideas to myself, but I was still practicing coming up with angles and creating pitchy summaries of those angles. Plus, I was kind of a weirdly tough editor and rejected most of my own ideas.¹³

I learned to write in a concise, punchy style—and to come up with interesting hooks. There is no audience more murderously critical than zine readers, so any article that didn’t grab people right away, that overstayed its welcome, or didn’t provide something interesting was mercilessly lambasted.

I learned to meet deadlines. It was an old joke in the zine world that no one delivered issues on time, but I had a strict schedule and I hit my dates, which is a skill that comes in handy. Professional writing is a business of deadlines, whether you’re working on a freelance article or a short story. Editors don’t like it if you don’t deliver on time, and my (largely self-imposed) commitment to producing four issues of The Inner Swine every year taught me how to manage time and ensure I never missed a date.

Most importantly, publishing a zine taught me how to write.

In the Lab

I’m proud of my zine era—I sold a lot of issues! I published a collection of articles from the zine as a real, actual book!¹⁴—but it was, after all, an underground zine. Not many people remember it these days.

But that was a feature, not a bug. It was total freedom. I wrote fake transcripts of fake talk shows where I debated Mumm-Ra the Ever Living and Frank Sinatra about the meaning of existence.¹⁵ I created Mr. Mute!, the world’s first and probably only Virtually Artless Comic.¹⁶ I mean, I just wrote whatever the hell I wanted and tried all kinds of writing that I wouldn’t have been brave enough to submit to an agent or publisher.

The key was the zine’s liminal existence: It was obscure, but there was an audience, in the form of the couple hundred subscribers and the folks who shilled out two bucks at a Tower Records. I was simultaneously writing for an audience and writing just for myself. I was free to experiment and write weird stuff and be self-indulgent, because a shockingly small number of people were going to read whatever I put into each issue. But I was also going to get a lot of feedback on that writing, because the people who go out of their way to find and read zines are some of the smartest and most merciless critics in the universe, and they sent me their thoughts. So, so many thoughts. I got letters, emails, and formal reviews in other people’s zines.

Repeat that cycle for 18 years, and you learn a few things about what works and what doesn’t. The structure of it was crucial; sure, anyone can just write whatever crazy stuff they want, whenever they want, without losing a fortune publishing a zine or a newsletter. But it wouldn’t be the same. It was the combination of nothing-to-lose underground vibe, a regular publishing schedule, and the perceived pressure of an audience that was actually paying attention that made my zine into a pressurized writing master class.¹⁷

So, yes, my zine publishing days are a big part of why I make my living writing today. If you’re wondering whether I would recommend aspiring writers start publishing their own zines, however, perhaps you forgot the part where I lost money on every issue.

Footnotes

1. This lasted until I realized how much math is required to do anything of real value in this world, at which point I gave up. ↩︎
2. Admittedly, that second part of the plan hasn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. ↩︎
3. AKA the “eating regularly” and “has health insurance” sense. ↩︎
4. Then again, I’m a person who is consistently disappointed when people don’t turn and shout my name when I enter a room. ↩︎
5. Including my 7th Grade teacher, who was mildly horrified once she figured out who I was. ↩︎
6. If you ever want to feel really, really cool, tell people about the new saddle stapler you just bought. ↩︎
7. They were for sale all over the world. No, really! ↩︎
8. Thirty years later, I can tell you with confidence: Fuckin’ short. ↩︎
9. I am fluent in authentic Jersey City Gibberish, a dying language. ↩︎
10. A surprising (disturbing?) number, as it turned out. ↩︎
11. As opposed to today, when I’m fairly certain my wife, The Duchess, knows who I am. Fairly certain. ↩︎
12. After being told by my Day Job that it wasn’t them, it was definitely me (fair). ↩︎
13. But, as we’ll see when we get to the part about Mumm-Ra, I probably should have rejected more. ↩︎
14. The Freaks are Winning, a collaboration with Tower Magazines, that I typeset myself on a pirated copy of Adobe Pagemaker 6.5. Hard to find, but I have about 500 sitting around the house if you want one. ↩︎
15. Inebriation may have been involved in some of these articles. ↩︎
16. This comic also lacked jokes and a point. ↩︎
17. I realize using the phrase “master class” in reference to my goofy self is usually ridiculous, but writing is my one and only skill. Let me have this. ↩︎