Make the Weird Little Thing.

The hardest part of making a zine is convincing yourself you're allowed to. That's it. That's the actual barrier. The format is unbelievably forgiving. The tools cost five dollars. The audience is whoever you decide to hand it to.

Here's how to make one this week. Not next week. This week.

1. Pick one idea

Don't try to cover your whole worldview. Pick one tiny thing. Examples:

• Five things you wish you'd known at 22.
• A field guide to every cat on your street.
• Recipes for less than $4.
• An angry love letter to a band that broke up.
• A short comic about the inside of a vending machine.
• A history of the most haunted parking lot in your hometown.

The smaller and weirder, the better. Specific beats grand.

2. Use one sheet of paper

For your first zine, just use one sheet. Letter or A4. Fold it twice. You now have 8 little pages. That's your whole zine. There is a one-sheet mini-zine fold that uses a single cut down the middle and gives you a tiny booklet — search "8 page mini zine fold" and you'll find a hundred videos showing it.

You don't need to make a perfect-bound 60-page object. You're not Penguin Random House. You're a person with one piece of paper.

3. Write messy

Handwrite it. Type it. Print it weird. Cut and paste. Use a typewriter if you have one. Use crayon if you have one. The point is to make a thing, not to make a polished thing. If you can read it, it's done.

4. Add images or don't

Photocopy collage works great. Old magazines. Doodles. Clip art. Photos. Or nothing. Words are fine on their own.

5. Fold, copy, staple

Take it to a copy shop or your office printer. Make 5-20 copies. Fold them. Staple in the middle (a long-arm stapler is nice but not required — you can also use a regular stapler and just press hard).

Done is better than perfect. Mailed is better than drafted.

6. Mail it before your inner critic gets a vote

This is the most important step. Before you reread it for the eighteenth time. Before you fix that one sentence. Before you redo the cover. Mail it. Hand it out. List it on Zine Exchange. Get it out of your room.

Why? Because your inner critic has a 100% kill rate if you give it time. The only way zines ever make it into the world is when someone says "good enough" and mails the thing.

What if I want to be fancier?

Great. You can do half-letter folded zines (fold a letter-size sheet once, 8 pages of half-letter), full-letter saddle-stitched zines (fold and staple multiple sheets), perfect-bound zines, riso-printed zines, screen-printed covers, hand-sewn binding, the works. There's an entire weird subculture of zine fabrication and we love every part of it.

But please, please make a one-sheet mini-zine first. You'll learn more from finishing a tiny zine than from planning a beautiful zine that never gets folded.

Now do it.

Put down the phone. Find paper. Pick an idea. Make the weird little thing. Mail it to someone who'll be glad they got it.