Over the years I have found writing to be a meaningful discipline, but would start and stop my journals. In 2006, as part of a sabbatical, I began journaling in what morphed, about a year later into this blog. I had mixed motivations for the project in the beginning. I understood the spiritual value of regular writing, but I also wanted to develop my skills as a professional writer. One way to learn to write is by writing. It seemed to me at the time that writing an essay every day would help to hone my skills as a writer. Now, eight years and over 2,900 essays after starting the discipline, I haven’t missed a single day. I’m not sure that I have become a better writer. It is likely that I would learn more by revisiting some of my essays, editing and honing them and working on improvement rather than focusing on sheer volume. After all, what inspires us as readers is not the amount someone has written, but rather the quality of what is written.

There are, however, many successful writers and storytellers who followed the discipline of writing every day and from their work came some very high quality documents.

A perpetual challenge of this type of writing is selecting topics for the blog. Sometimes, I have several possible blog topics come to me in a single day. I keep lists of blog ideas and there will be times when I have a week or more of ideas at once. Then other times come when I go for days without producing a new idea and the list dwindles to nothing. An not every idea that comes to me becomes a blog. Some of them are just bad ideas and not worthy of a 1,000-word essay. I have some good ideas and some bad ideas. Occasionally a bad idea can be turned into a good idea with a few days of reflection and a little work.

There are other times when I go to bed in the evening with no clue what the blog topic for the next day may be. I’ve been known to sit for a half hour or more just coming up with a topic. There are a few web sites that I visit and a few other bloggers whose work I read for inspiration. Interestingly my favorite blog sites have writers who are regular and disciplined in their posts, but none of them post daily. Some of my favorite sites have multiple writers, each taking one day of the week.

My goal, however, is not to be able to reflect the ideas of others, but rather to write what is on my heart and mind. I have never tried to restrict the topics of the blog. This isn’t a blog devoted exclusively to theology or philosophy except in the very broadest definitions of those words. I write about technology, pets, relationships, family, church, and current events. I try not to restrict my ideas, but to encourage their flow. For several years I would visit a half dozen or more news sites first thing in the morning, before writing the blog, and often a blog idea would come from those sites. I like to get news from a variety of perspectives so check out British, Costa Rican, Australian, and Israeli newspaper sites as well as The Washington Post, New York Times and Chicago Tribune. That practice, however, seemed to produce a bit too much reaction to current events for my taste, so I changed my discipline. These days I try to write first thing upon rising before going through the news sites. It isn’t that the blog is uninfluenced by the daily news. Rather, I give myself time to process the news by looking at it after writing and mulling it through the day.

Although the blog isn’t a research paper in any stretch of the word, I do allow myself access to the Internet while writing. I have a second monitor so that I generally write the blog on the screen to the right while having the ability to look up items on the screen on the left. I try to limit my browsing while writing to fact checking. I also try to be disciplined about indicating my sources when writing about a topic or idea that I got from someone else. Ideas, however, are rarely unique. Most of my thoughts have been influenced by conversations, reading, and relationships with others. It is not uncommon for my ideas to reflect my studies of the history of philosophy. By reading about the history of ideas, I discover that my ideas fit into patterns of thinking that were circulating in human cultures before I was born. I like the feeling of wresting with big ideas and regular readers of the blog know that I frequently refer to ideas that take multiple generations to be fully developed. I also like the mental challenge of organizing my thinking in such a way that I might pass on thoughts to younger generations. I imagine that questions I have pondered will be considered in the future by children yet to be conceived as they find their way in the world. I enjoy intergenerational enterprises.

Furthermore, as you can tell from today’s post, occasionally I write about the process of writing itself. I am frequently asked how I come up with my ideas for the blog. I have reflected on that question, but I’m not sure that I understand the process. Mostly, I believe it is a product of being a voracious reader and being influenced by the things I read and hear. Yesterday I was listening to a podcast in which a composer was reflecting on the process of writing music. I’m sure that podcast got my mind stirred about the process of writing essays. I’m not sure that many composers write every day, but I suspect that like, writers, they have ideas that work out and others that are discarded.

I don’t know how long I will keep up this discipline of daily writing. For now it seems to be meaningful. Certainly the universe has many more topics worthy of thought.

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