Why zines might be the secret to better fiction
A novelist discovers community beats craft every time
What if the most important writing lesson has nothing to do with prose style or plot structure?
Jeff Miller just said something that made me pause: "Possibly the greatest lesson I got from the zine is that writing is about community." He's talking about how making zines taught him to become a novelist, which sounds backwards until you think about it.
You make them in your bedroom and hand them to strangers at coffee shops.
But that's exactly why they work as training wheels for fiction. When you're making a zine, you're not thinking about the Great American Novel. You're thinking about the person who might read this thing next week. You write differently when you know your audience isn't abstract.
I keep coming back to the way Madeline Miller handles intimacy in The Song of Achilles. The relationship between Patroclus and Achilles feels immediate, like you're overhearing a conversation between two people who actually know each other. Miller spent years workshopping that book, but I wonder if some of that intimacy comes from understanding that writing is always, at its core, one person talking to another person.
This might be a stretch, but I think zines teach you something workshops can't: how to be vulnerable without being precious about it. When you're photocopying 50 copies of your thoughts about breakups or your weird dreams, you learn to get over yourself pretty quickly.
The gift guide for writer mothers that LitHub mentions feels connected to this somehow. Writing mothers know about community because they're already juggling multiple relationships, multiple voices demanding attention. They understand that writing doesn't happen in isolation, even when you're alone at your desk.
Honestly, I'm not sure if this holds up for every writer. Some people need the solitude, the monastery approach to craft. But Miller's point about zines creating community makes sense when you think about how many novelists started in small scenes, local readings, tiny publications that nobody outside their city ever heard of.
Maybe that's what we lose when we skip straight to thinking about novels: the sense that writing is something you do with people, not just for them.
The community teaches you things craft books never mention. Like how to keep going when nobody cares about your work yet. Or how to tell when something you wrote actually connects with another human being.
