I used to write fan fictions for myself for the purpose of wish fulfillment where I would insert myself into stories as a character. It was great fun and I like typing on my keyboards. You know how pokemon evolve? Well, readers are simply the un-evolved form of authors. When they gain enough experience through battle (reading) they might evolve. Other readers need to use a stone or meet special conditions (need a trigger in life) to evovle.
I started writing because I found that I could derive the same kind of pleasure from it that I was able to get from reading a good story. Writing made me feel good, it helped my literary skills in my professional life, it helped me understand myself more, and it helped me enjoy stories more. I first started writing one summer when I was seriously procrastinating from other important stuff. Actually, I can say that I obsessively wrote for 2 weeks straight, everyday, totally ignoring everything else in my life. Terrible life decision, but f##k it felt good and everything was okay in the end. LAWL.
So the first step was writing fanfictions where I would insert myself as a character. Writing fanfiction type stuff allowed me to spend more time enjoying the stories that I loved. It was easier to get used to writing this way because fanfictions build off of pre-existing characters, world-building, and storyline. The story is basically 90% complete before a person even starts to write. Everything I wrote was never meant to be viewed by anyone else than myself so I could write complete garbage super fast for pure fun. Like up to 20k words in a day which was ridiculous. This fanfiction stuff was like my training wheels and got me used to thinking from the perspective of different characters as I considered how they would react to my own character and changes that I made to story events.
After writing fanfictions for a while I transitioned to writing my own original stories and characters. These were more like LitRPG stories. Once again I wrote purely for fun without caring about plot holes, grammar, realism, rationality or anything like that. All this writing taught me how to do world-building, develop rational magic systems, and it introduced me to constructing much more complex original characters. These stories taught me my shortcomings as an author and what I needed to improve on. Supporting characters were not good enough. As I wrote long stories for myself I found myself getting seriously disorganized after 200k + words. Then I realized I needed to become more organized by having some kind of textfile/folder system so that I could keep track of my story outline, my characters, locations, countries, world-building background, and so much more.
I still write this kind of fun garbage for myself all the time depending on what kind of thought/emotion/feeling/premise/idea I want to explore at the time. However, I started becoming unsatisfied with this casual writing only for myself. I now care about all the characters in my story, not giving my MC special attention. The story isn't about things going right anymore, instead my story is completely focused about what goes wrong and how everyone struggles desperately. I used to care about the protagonist the most, but now I realize that the protagonist is nothing without the villain! The villain is everything! I wanted to produce a real story that I could fully apply all my efforts to and be proud of. I wanted to seriously write a story and it had to be my own original story and characters. Thus I am here, passionately writing my story, giving my best effort. My standards are very high so I finally want to produce something I can be proud of and feel like I accomplished something I can show off. My new story is nothing like the stuff I wrote in the past. It's a story not just for me, it's a story for me and everyone else to enjoy and stress over. I now want to produce something like all those stories that I love.