I made my google-doc diary into a zine

and you can too!

I write a diary as close to daily as I can — but daily is a very loose approximation of my frequency in personal writing. I aspire to The Artist’s Way-esque morning pages, and at times I can get somewhere near there, but in this season of life with little children and many demands, a few lines written a few times a week feels like a victory. For a long time, I journaled exclusively on paper, but in recent years it has felt much better to type my diary in a long ongoing google doc. My fingers can move at the speed of my mind. This is not an era in which I have the luxury of “slowing down.” If I slow down, it will not happen. I need to get the thoughts out as swiftly as I can think them, and then pour a cup of milk and change a diaper. But diary keeping is a value of mine, and I find that the more I do it the more I want to — kind of like exercise. You start to crave the space it offers, the release. It feels so good to find a rhythm and keep showing up consistently. I find it really goes in seasons for me. I have verbose months, and I have silent months in terms of personal writing. Both belong.

This morning, I realized that my current diary doc had gotten pretty long, spanning about four months of consistent entries. I took a scroll through it, wanting to see what had gathered there. So much! So much life! I made a new document to start fresh for February, then I felt the fleeting regret that the diary I was leaving behind wasn’t on paper, wishing to flip through the pages instead of scroll. I was about to just close the tab, and let it exist just as a file in my google drive. A file among a zillion other files. That felt kind of sad to me. A diary is so much more than just a file! It was then that I realized — I could make it a zine! In like fifteen minutes! So, reader, that’s what I did.

So satisfying! If you’ve been reading here a while, you know that I’m no stranger to making zines. I’ve been making zines off and on for the past ten years, and just recently I went big and published a year-long zine series about the first year after my second son’s birth. I love zines, I love making them, and I love them as objects. So a diary zine, just for me, felt like such a beautiful way to honor this artifact of my life. I don’t want my interstitial writing to only be on the internet. I want it to exist in the world as a tactile little book. Something I can hold in my hands and read. Something my grandchildren or great grandchildren could find in a box somewhere and open up to read my little daily secrets someday when I am not with them anymore. Something to exist. That word feels important to me. Of course, things on the internet exist too. But there is a finality to printed text. These are my words, they exist.

I printed my zine, folded it, made a little cover, stapled it, trimmed the edges, and held it in my hands. I revisited a few poem drafts in the pages, feeling struck by them anew to see them printed on paper. I read some feelings from hard days. I found election day, the days after. I closed the zine and set it on the table. Now that diary is done, and I’ve started a new document. And so it continues. This is the writing I do only for myself. To give it a little more space in the physical world felt like a lovely exercise in affirmation, or that feeling of self-esteem that I keep coming back to (recently, here). I exist! My writing, the writing that is only mine, exists! That’s something. And making it a zine gave it just a little bit more substance. These small things can matter, even just to us.

“Drank tea, ate popcorn.” My own literature. It exists.

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I posted about this on instagram and a few people asked for instructions for how to turn do it, so I wrote up these simple instructions. Huge shoutout to

Amelia Greenhall

and Adam (more from them at ANEMONE) for making Spectrolite, an amazing offering to risograph printers and zine makers everywhere. None of my recent zine work would have been possible without this app that makes making zines truly seamless. And, without further ado:

How to Turn Your Digital Diary (or pretty much any document) into a Printable Zine

(heads up that Spectrolite is a mac app, so this method only works on mac computers)

1. Start with any document that you want to make into a zine. Write it, edit it, clean it up, get it ready to go. Resize the document to 5.5” x 8.5” or “Statement” Size. In google docs, you will go to Page Setup and it will look like this:

2. Make sure you like the way it is formatted in this new size, resize and shuffle things around and add or subtract whatever you like, and when you are ready download the document as a PDF. (File —> Download —> PDF)

3. Open Spectrolite. You can download it here for FREE! (And send Amelia and Adam a tip if you’d like!)

https://spectrolite.app/

4. In the “Layouts” tab, select “Letter” under sheet size, and “Zine” under layout type — (or mess around with it and do something else, but that will get you to zine layouts for typical home printers)

5. Select “Half Letter Portrait Zine”

6. Drag your PDF file onto the mockup. It should appear sideways inside the box like this:

7. Over on the right hand size, mess around with the settings however you’d like, then click the grey button labeled “Export.” These are the settings I used, very basic (though I should have toggled “page numbers” on since I forgot to add them to the doc, so bear that in mind if your doc is unnumbered. It helps to double check that you haven’t mixed up your pages when folding later on).

8. Open your Imposed PDF using a PDF reader on your computer (like preview or adobe reader), and then print double-sided. If your printer can’t do double sided printing, I recommend going to the library or a copy shop.

9. Yay! You have a little zine! Now, you can fold the pages, make a cover (cardstock works best, especially the more pages you have), and staple or bind it however you’d like! (Warning that a normal stapler doesn’t really work with zines like this, you need a “long arm” stapler.) Hooray!

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Thanks so much for reading! Let me know if you hit any snags or have any questions, I’m more than happy to help troubleshoot zine making. Leave a comment with any thoughts and please feel free to share this with anyone who you think might like to use it to make some zines. You can use this method for any document, not just diaries! But to start with a diary is a beautiful thing. Something just for you.

P.S. If you want to check out my zines that are not my super secret personal diary, you can find them here! Many are still in print, and they’re also available for digital download. Zines forever!

Xo, Amy