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Kids today have it too easy! Yeah, I’m sounding like a grumpy old man, but I think that’s because I’m fast becoming one. But think back to when you were a spotty teen, convinced that someday you would be a brilliant writer. No doubt you, like me, happily filled notebooks with stories. Like me, you probably contributed to school magazines. If your school didn’t have one, maybe, like me, you banded together with friends and smooth-talked a tame teacher to create one. Like me, you probably spent too much of your teenage years scrubbing ink off your fingers from the cheap biros you used to scribble down short stories.
Today I came across a little gem from my personal history that just reminded me how different things were for budding young writers or determined amateur publishers 25 years ago. I’m clearing out the cupboards at our place at the moment and throwing up anything marginally collectable onto eBay. One such item is a batch of old Doctor Who fan-club newsletters that may find a new home with a new fan somewhere. Having a quick leaf through these pages from 1984 I came across an advert that my friends and I had placed in the newsletter when we were about 14 or 15. It was for our own lovingly produced Doctor Who fanzine, which we called The Great Intelligence (without a hint of irony). The premise of the magazine was an attempt to cover a different Doctor Who story in depth in each issue. It wasn’t an original idea – although we deluded ourselves that somehow ours would be far better. But that’s young enthusiasm for you.
Back in those days, getting your own fan writings out to the world was not as easy as it is now. Today, if someone is unhealthily obsessed with a telly show like Lost or Dexter or even the new Doctor Who, it just takes an afternoon with a computer and a website builder application to launch a fan site capable of reaching a large number of eager readers with their obsessive writings.
But back in 1984, producing our fanzine meant days and days carefully writing out articles in longhand before typing out each page on an old typewriter with a dodgy ribbon. This was before our family owned a video player and before Doctor Who stories were widely available anyway, so all our research was done by listening to faded audio recordings that had been passed from fan to fan over the decades. Hours spent listening through a crackly hiss of seventh generation static to try and determine exactly what the Doctor just said to that Dalek.
But writing was not all. Artwork also had to be produced as we certainly didn’t have the budget to purchase the rights to official BBC photos. So we mimicked the black and white pointillist technique popular among fan artists at the time (it printed well).Now the blue ink stains on my fingers were now battling for space with black india ink from extremely fine-nibbed art pens and I probably risked a permanent squint and arthritic fingers with hours spent building up tiny black dots into some alien face.
Bringing all the disparate elements together, whole weekends were spent huddled around one dining table or another as we fiddled with bits of Letraset, finished off the artwork and pasted up the final pages. Parents just happy we weren’t out mugging pensioners brought in the occasional sandwich or cuppa as we toiled for hours.
Each issue was printed on the offset lithograph machine at the back of our school library. We were lucky to be allowed to use it, as long as we paid for the paper. Then, adverts needed to be created and paid for, orders taken and the finished product shipped out. Orders came in with postal orders attached and I managed our post office account to balance our printing and equipment costs against our ‘profits’.
It was hard. We had to devote so much of our free time to it. Publishing our own magazine meant not only doing the fun bit of writing what we wanted to write, but also the hard work of editing and producing a magazine we thought was fit for sale. What is interesting to me, looking back, is that we never shirked from doing what was required. We obviously wanted to publish – it was in us from an early age. We were unwittingly carrying out the first journalism apprenticeships of our careers.
Matthew is now a broadcaster for the BBC and – I must jealously admit – has also written two Doctor Who adventures for the Big Finish range. I am now a professional writer and content manager for magazines, websites, blogs and more and have been humbled and lucky enough to win a couple of peer-reviewed awards along the way (though I’m yet to get my own Wikipedia page… hmmmph!). We are both now part of far, far bigger publishing mechanisms that do the dirty work for us – no more Letraset! But our career paths started back then at our dining room tables. It was what we had to do, no matter how hard it was or how much time it took.
But technology has meant that eager teenage self-publishers today will never know the pain of smudged ink on artwork or having to type out an article three times because of typos and no more pocket money for liquid paper. Yes, it is easier getting our words out to an audience these days – the words you’re reading were published online and read by subscribers within seconds of me writing them. Gone are those innocent days of fanzines created in such a rustic fashion. Even those fanzines that do still get printed are created in fantastic desktop publishing programs, images tweaked in Photoshop and more fonts than Letraset could ever hope for.
Somehow I think they’re missing out on something.
