The ugly truth about having an imaginary audience.

You can always come up with a ton of reasons as to why you shouldn’t try to write. There’s always a reason why not to do something. But when it comes to writing, the list of reasons will more often than not tend to expand itself the more you think about it. Not only what you’re attempting to write will subject you to your own potential criticism of yourself, it puts you under the pressure of being judged by many people, most of which will be the kind of people who are smart enough to understand what you’re talking about. That latter pressure is exacerbated by the fact that you’re most likely expecting that to take place at some unknown time in the future, because when you’re still starting out, chances are, no one will read your work at a time that is close to that which it has been published. You don’t know how people are going to receive it, because you never got any feedback from any person among the living. So you’re doing your best to make sure that the amount of work that will be currently present at the time where people will discover you exist in the future does not contain any tiny mistake that could be overlooked if your work was judged every step of the way by others, and not as a whole suddenly years later from when you began it, where the end result of these inevitable tiny mistakes will be hard to overlook, because tiny little mistakes that pile up year after year are bound to amount to something that is too obvious to ignore, that matches the size of a mountain that is worthy of mentioning over and over again by every serious critic that can potentially come across it someday. The problem isn’t in the very existence of these mistakes. Not even when they are too huge to overlook or ignore. The problem is that you need to stay too hypervigilant trying in a futile attempt to minimize such mistakes to the best of your ability, because people cannot discover you if your work is trash. And you can’t know whether or not you meet the minimum threshold required for discoverability without relying entirely on your imagination as the ultimate tool that you have no option but to resort to in order to determine whether or not the current reasons for the fact that you haven’t been discovered yet have nothing to do with the quality of your work, which nevertheless, you need to work on improving anyway in order to stay sharp. No one told you why your work sucked. And that is driving you crazy. You have no option but to minimize the necessity of having to go back and spend a couple of years editing loads and loads of your work that only at some point in the future you grew an extra brain cell that allowed you to understand why it’s horrible beyond imagination in a fashion that renders it criminal to not go back and spend as much time just to get the quality of your work above zero. A quality that doesn’t make anyone who has read more than two books in their life so far not feel too nauseous. People are here to feed their brains, not to pay an emergency visit to the hospital only to be told that their labs came all back negative. The reason behind their ailment is entirely psychological. In other words, you. That constant pressure, coupled with denial of reward as a result of lack of any kind of immediate gratification whatsoever from what you’ve accomplished so far, makes you associate writing with something that puts you under immense stress almost all of the time during the writing process and afterwards, with nothing to show for it that could serve as proof that it was all worth it, at least to your unconscious mind, that keeps telling you that we are working hard all the time and still nothing is happening. There are enough voices up there, and you want to keep them to a minimum as much as you could. I’m sorry but this story has no happy ending. There’s no solution to this problem but to get discovered.