I hear you, just trying to stick to the guidelines.
I think that the point that all of these tyoe of articles miss is that if everyone is trying to create, you need someone to consume. Otherwise it's a bunch of folks yelling into the wind.
Do you? Or, does it need to be someone other than yourself? I write for its own sake, because I enjoy it. I don't publish it anywhere. I make art, and just hang it on my own walls. I make jewelry and don't sell it, just give it to my family. I make sculptures that just sit in my garden. We create and consume our own work. And it is completely satisfying.
There is a beautiful introduction in the book They Became What They Beheld by Edmund Carpenter, who was a student of Marshall McLuhan back in the day. The relevant part I'm thinking of:
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
Some people get personal satisfaction from creating. Some people get it from creating for other people. Some people get it from the pure act of bringing into being something which did not exist before.
I hope you realize how lucky you are to be one of the people who can create for its own sake; if more people were like that, the world would likely be a vastly better place.
I think that the point that all of these tyoe of articles miss is that if everyone is trying to create, you need someone to consume. Otherwise it's a bunch of folks yelling into the wind.