I blog for my friends.

In a perfect world I might be able to share my thoughts with them every night over coffee at Rembrant’s or appatizers at Applebee’s, but a perfect world this is not. So I share through my blog, conquering distance and time through the power of the internet. It is a less than perfect substitute to be sure, but every little bit helps in this fast moving world. Does anybody else blog for this reason?

Maybe he just has a large ego and thinks he has some superior ability to inspire and edify off the top of his head. The people he is leading in the group are lucky to get the opportunity to receive his special wisdom and insight? Was he trying to be clever or just trick everyone?

Did you stay the whole time or did you leave early?

I went to a bible study last week where there was a substitute teacher. He started out the lesson by bragging for five minutes about how he had not had time to prepare. To him that meant that if you got something out of what he said it was God “speaking into your life” (a phrase I dislike). To me it meant that he didn’t really care at all about being there and didn’t mind wasting other peoples time. He also spent quite a bit of time talking about how he doesn’t read many books because he feels compelled to respond to what he reads, and since he doesn’t, he tries not to read much.

I should waste my time listening to someone like that why?

Thanks for the insightful post. My reasons for writing are widely varied and, at least in my blog, change from post to post. Sometimes it is to share information that I have found useful and perceive that it may be useful to someone else. Sometimes it is to express myself. I often express myself better in written word than I do in spoken phrases. It allows me to, like you, gather my thoughts in an orderly fashion. I am reminded of a time when I was asked to give my testimony at a New Year’s Eve church service. I basically read aloud what I had written in preparation for the service (and in doing so broke every rule I had ever learned with respect to public speaking). But I simply didn’t feel like I could communicate what I wanted to say that night with an outline or cue cards. I wanted the words and the thoughts behind them to be expressed clearly and in the way that I originally conceived them, not a vague representation.

At other times writing is an outlet for my emotions–I can release strong feelings that I have about something, feelings of elation, anger, sadness, disagreement, etc.

Writing also allows me to vent my creativity. I greatly enjoy developing a thought or thoughts into a written expression, particularly expression that will spark discussion or possibly revelation for others.

In your excerpt, Stephen King said that we should come to writing every way but lightly. I agree. We have a resonsibility to ourselves, our minds, to take our writing seriously. Writing is a journey into the depths of our thought, an extraction of ideas travelling around in our heads.

Thanks again for prompting us to think through our motives for writing.

I am just a dumb old southern boy. I prefer to keep things simple. I agree that writing helps me sort things in my mind. Sometimes I proof what I have written mainly to see if I have misused a word that the spell checker will not find. Sometimes it is just mainly the challenge to see if I can communicate a thought clearly. This does not imply that I have clear thoughts! But I do like the voices and I listen to them daily. I also seem to write as a way of winding down at the end of a long night at work. Kind of my own little way of shutting the system down and going to sleep.