Write for yourself, first and foremost

If you're of a creative mindset, whatever the form of expression you use as an outlet for your creativity there is inevitably the question of who you create for - do you create for yourself, or for others, or do you try and find a balance between both of these influences?

When you create for yourself, ultimately the act of creation is a form of self expression, and introspection. Everything you create ultimately comes from somewhere inside of you, what you choose to express reflects an internal state. This becomes the most difficult to face when you create characters you want to hate, even if you draw from external influences for inspiration, the character you create is an extension of you. In order to convey what a character thinks and feels, and how they act, you have to embody the mentality of the character which forces you to face the reality that what the character does is an impression of what you yourself would do in their situation.

When you create for others, the focus shifts away from your own desires, beliefs, and motivations, to the attention of the reader, their expectations, and whether what you create can be comprehended, or believed which forces you to embody the mindset of the reader. This brings its own problems when you have to resolve a conflict of interest, where the reader may desire one outcome and you desire another, whose expectations take priority?

There are those who will argue that any act of creation that prioritises the reader over the author will ultimately produce derivative content, because it will inherently produce content that is predictable and rooted in what the reader has already experienced.

Conversely there are those who will argue that any act of creation that reverses this dichotomy and prioritises the author over the reader will produce content that becomes specific in taste to that of the author, in other words you might produce something you enjoy but no-one else does.

Holding both of these viewpoints in balance and rejecting them both leads you to the realisation that the focus doesn't matter in the end for the simple reason that we aren't as unique as we like to convince ourselves. If you cater to your own taste, yes that may produce content that is niche, but it won't produce content that literally no-one else enjoys, your taste is not unique no matter how much you may have convinced yourself to the contrary.

The greatest barrier to creation is the thought process we employ before we act. If you over-think it, you'll convince yourself that everything you create is shit, in the same way that the advice and counsel that we give others on anything they come to us seeking help with, always simplifies and abstracts their lives and complicates our own - "This advice will work for you because I simplify your life, but it wouldn't work for me because I can give you a million intricate details and explanations why my life is unique and I am exempt" - the reality is that this is almost never true.

To resolve conflict between your ideas, fuelled by your desire to create, and a lack of action, fuelled by your own self-deprecation and hypercritical mindset, you need to accept one simple truth - you will create shit. That may sound like defeat but it's the opposite, the true defeat, the only true failure is the failure to try. Accept that what you create first will be shit and push ahead anyway with the belief that you will refine your ideas in motion.

In other words, write. Even if you think what you write is shit, keep writing. Add to it, take from it, revise it, until it becomes something you enjoy.