Being Bad at Hobbies as a Creative Strategy (and Zine Again!)
What if being bad at your hobbies is a good thing?
Maybe having creative hobbies you don’t expect yourself to be good at supports skill growth in other creative work—even serving as a reminder that interesting and worthwhile work doesn’t require perfection would help, right?
I regularly need to work around confidence-related worries to keep writing. I want my writing to be enjoyable, relatable, and sound literate. I want my plot to make sense. I worry, of course, that none of these things are true, and sometimes it seems like the journey to sharing my writing with a stranger is impossibly long.
I’m still working on the novel, and I still think it has promise, but the developmental edit is taking a while. Also, there have been some changes in my life that are demanding attention—for one, I’m in the process of packing to move and it’s a major undertaking.
Here’s something else I need to remind myself of: What looks like natural talent is often the result of years of practice. What motivates practice? Interest. What sustains interest? Fun.
What’s not fun is feeling bad at something you expect yourself to be good at. So the challenge is to find a way not to expect “good” writing. (For this blog, good writing is whatever you think it is.)
One way into that for me has been drawing and making these minizines. It gives me a way to practice sharing the result of a creative hobby that I don’t expect myself to be good at. It’s fun, and it’s easy to draw these doodles when I’m not trying to reach any particular threshold of observable artistic skill. (I’m not insulting my zines or my drawings, here; I like them. But I also don’t expect anyone to look at my drawings and be overcome by my artistry.)
My drawing hobby has helped me remember that my writing doesn’t have to be good yet, it just has to be my writing. The beautiful thing about writing is that you can make it better with edits and rewrites; it doesn’t have to come out fully formed or even sort of clean.
Book Recommendations
You Devil: Doodles & Surprises © 2026 by Ann Cooper
Zine Again! You Devil: Doodles & Surprises
Zine three is here! It’s not another issue of Emotional Self-Portraits and Surprises, this one is made of doodles involving a new character who showed up when I was drawing a phrase that had popped into my mind from wherever weird thoughts are born.
The phrase I was drawing was: “Two inches off a burning devil haunchy, raging.” The devil character, who I see as a friendly puckish figure (there are zero religious connotations of any sort intended here), arrived as I drew and I’m using that drawing for the cover of the zine.
This latest zine will be available for free to the newsletter subscribers—look for a link in this month’s newsletter. If you’re reading this post later, you can also get this zine and the previous zine by subscribing to my newsletter; the links will be in your welcome email. My first zine is free to download here.
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