Know your creative style and process.

Creative Struggles

By staff writer Craig Atkinson

Zines are an open space for creativity. There are no templates. Which means there are no two made the same. A zine can be one page, 64 pages, or folded in any shape your heart desires. Open space for creativity, right.

I do a chat show with my friend Ryan (_my_name_is_ryan_) where were talk with zinesters about their work and their zines, and something that always comes up when talking about their style is that they didn’t know how to do something, so they had to do it this way. For example, we were chatting to someone the other week, and they said they weren’t confident in being able to staple straight, and they didn’t have a long arm stapler, so they decided to use a sewing machine to bind their zine.

Every person we chat with we hear this same thing in one form or another. And of course, I have my own version of this.

A few years ago I made two issues of a mini zine. I needed to make it as cheaply as possible, so I made a 16 page zine out of one large B4 (257mm X 364mm) sheet of paper that I could copy at the local convenience store. To make this possible I had to print the text in the middle of the page by bringing in the margins on my word doc all the way in so that the text was printed down the center of the page. With a width of 4 cm. I then printed my 700 word story which ran down 12 pages, cut around the text, then glued them onto a master copy. I was also not confident in drawing a cover, so I printed a photo that I took on my phone as the cover art.

All that was born out of many limitations. We all have them, even if a lot of our limitations are self imposed.

There are many thoughts on limitations and how they are just restraints on our mind, but there are many good things that come out of these limitations.

Limitations create your style. They make your zine distinctly you. You have to become creative within those limitations. My limitations vary, but when we learn to work within them, our creativity becomes limitless.

I worked as an assistant restaurant manager many many years ago, and I’ve never forgotten what the owner said to me. He said, “The more choices a customer has on a menu, the harder it is for them to decide.”

This is also true for ourselves. The more skills you have when it comes to making art, the harder it is to make. If you feel you can only do one thing, or only a short list of things, you create within that list.

Let’s use me as an example.

I’m not very good at drawing, but I do like to play in the art of drawing sometimes, so I leave that play for my covers. In addition, I don’t think I’m good at making up stories. When I write made up stories they don’t feel believable. So I base my zines and stories in real life, lived experiences. Within those stories, I don’t mind adding some sugar to make the story interesting, but for me the story has to be rooted in a lived experience. Which can make what I write limited, but it also makes it easy to work out what I’m going to write about, well that is once I decide on the story I’m going to tell. That is the hardest part for me, working out what I’m going to say. It often takes thousands of words to get to what I’m going to write about.

(Like this article, I have about 1,500 words that I will delete that has nothing to do with this topic, but it took getting those words out to get here)

The best thing you can do for yourself is to find your style and your process. This is not saying that you’ll have to always stick to that same style, as it will evolve over years, but it will give you a starting point.

I look at my process this way. I have to clear my head of all the junk that is going on in my mind. All the random thoughts about my life, the good and the bad, to dig deeper and get under all of that, to the core of my thoughts. Or else my stories would just be a newsletter (However, I do love a good newsletter, though).

Your process is probably very different. And as I spoke of Ryan before, the guy I do the chat show with, his process is wildly different from mine. He begins with a word (title) that gives him a theme for what he is going to create.

For me that would be very difficult. Maybe I could do it once, but it certainly couldn’t be my go to process. However, I did write something for a collaborative zine here in Tokyo that was themed, ‘something you found’. And I wrote a story about a key that I found near Shibuya crossing. The piece was illustrated by an amazing artist (Julia Nascimento), and was absolutely ecstatic with how it came out.

This was a really fun project, and something I might do again in the future. But for the most part I have got my process and know the skills I have, and and the ones I lack. I found this out by not worrying about how others create, but by thinking about what has worked for me in the past and going along with it. Not trying to fight it.