That is the first question you need to ask when you sit down to write, and if you can’t answer it in the affirmative, then you aren’t going to get very far. Why? Because writing without communication as its backbone isn’t anything. Words on a page with no organisation in the sense of what it is that you want to tell people about is little more than word salad.
What do you want to communicate? This can be something you decide on a case by case basis, or it can be something that informs all of your work. An overall message doesn’t necessary mean that you say the same thing over and over, it just means it provides a structure upon which you can build your more finely grained and less generalised pieces.
How do you want to communicate? This can be super simple – genre, format, medium, volume, whatever, or it can be a multi-part answer that reads like a catalogue of the history of an art form. Why stop at one thing? You can do everything if you want to. you just have to decide. Sometimes I forget to decide – and you can see it; you can tell … well, you could if I ever let that work get out of the gates. I only let the stuff that can run run.