I’ve talked before about putting out a zine; I published The Inner Swine for nearly 20 years, 100,000 words a year broken into four annual issues (until the last few years, when exhaustion got the better of me). The zine was always a way of getting my thoughts and fiction into print when no one wanted to actually pay me to do so, and it was a lot of fun. It was also the best training I could have put myself through.
Blogging Before Blogging
The first issue of The Inner Swine came out in 1995. The Internet existed, of course, but it wasn’t what it is today—it was new and primitive and no one was really sure how it was all going to shake out. Twenty years before I started getting paid to write 500-word blog posts, I was coming up with short, pithy articles for my zine on a wide variety of subjects (many of which I was 100% completely unqualified to write about; circa-2000 Jeff certainly thought he was smart enough to expound on any subject or point of view, no matter how distant he was from it in reality).
By the time I launched a freelance writing career, I’d already trained myself to come up with pitches and article ideas, then develop those ideas into short articles. Without realizing it, my zine prepared me for my future career as a professional writer.
Rules Before Rules
More importantly, I think, Writing Without Rules is kind of like a very special issue of my zine. It’s structure pretty much the same way and uses a similar writing style; every issue of The Inner Swine used to be centered on a specific theme, and I even did one or two writing-themed issues. In a lot of ways, WWR is a super-sized issue of The Inner Swine if it had a writing theme in the 21st century.
All of this is to say that no writing is truly valueless. Even if you’re not getting paid, or you have a small audience, every word you thoughtfully put down on the page or screen pays a small dividend, even if only in the sense of training yourself to write more effectively, efficiently, and energetically. When I got into a groove putting out four issues of a zine every year in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I had no idea I’d someday publish a book on writing. But nevertheless, The Inner Swine trained me to be able to do so.
It also trained me to be unaffected by negative criticism, because man that zine got some hate mail.
How about a book-length collection for those of us who missed out on this formative stage of your career? Perhaps: THE COMPLETE SWINE? 🙂
There’s a collection called THE FREAKS ARE WINNING you can track down — it only goes up to 2001 or so, but those were the zine’s best years anyway.