On Creativity and the Fear of Mediocrity

I haven’t written fiction in three years.

Not because I don’t have ideas. My notes app is full of them—fragments of stories, character sketches, worlds half-built. But every time I sit down to actually write, the same thought stops me:

What if it’s not good enough?

The Perfectionism Trap

We live in an age of infinite comparison. Every book, every story, every piece of art ever created is instantly accessible. When you can read Kafka and García Márquez and Morrison in the same afternoon, your own words feel desperately small.

Why add to the noise if you can’t add something extraordinary?

This is the trap. The belief that mediocrity is worse than silence.

The Math Doesn’t Add Up

Here’s the thing about creating: you can’t get to good without going through bad.

Every writer you admire has unpublished novels in a drawer. Every artist has a thousand terrible sketches. The path to mastery is paved with mediocre work—it’s just that we only see the destination, never the journey.

I have to remind myself: the three years I spent not writing didn’t make me a better writer. They made me a person who doesn’t write.

Permission to Suck

Maybe we need to reframe mediocrity.

What if creating something average isn’t failure—it’s data? A necessary step in learning what works and what doesn’t. You can’t improve what doesn’t exist.

The worst novel you could write is still better than the perfect novel you’ll never finish.

What We Miss

When we don’t create out of fear of mediocrity, we miss:

• The joy of the process itself
• The unexpected discoveries that come from doing
• The community of other creators
• The iterative improvement that only comes with practice

We trade the possibility of creating something meaningful for the certainty of creating nothing at all.

That’s not a good trade.

Starting Again

So I’m writing again. This essay is the first thing I’ve published in years, and it’s probably not very good. The sentences are rough. The structure is loose. I’m sure I’ve made my point three different ways.

But it exists. It’s out in the world. And that’s more than I had yesterday.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll write something better.

Maybe not.

Either way, I’ll have written.

The Question

What would you create if you gave yourself permission to be average?

What’s the cost of waiting for perfection?

And what if the thing you’re afraid to make—flawed and imperfect as it might be—is exactly what someone else needs to see?

Create anyway.

The world has enough perfect silence.

It needs your mediocre something.