Writers write because ...

It's come to this: I'm writing a blog about a blog. After three years plus and more than 800 blogs, some pretty good, some not, I've come to this.
 A fellow named Jeremy Myers wrote this about bloggers, Christian bloggers, that a good friend messaged me about.

I sometimes think blogging should be added to the list of spiritual disciplines.
If you blog, you know what I mean.
Here are some of the things that God grows in you through the blogging experience:

Humility of Blogging

When you first start, blogging is an exercise in humility. You think that you will instantly get thousands of readers and hundreds of comments. But you write for months, and nobody but your wife read it.

Perseverance in Blogging

As the months go by, it becomes an exercise in perseverance. It becomes a discipline to write, even if nobody is reading.

Healing through Blogging

Somewhere along the way, if you can work through the feelings of rejection and bitterness that nobody is reading, you realize that your writing is cathartic. It touches some of the painful and dark places in your life, and through the exercise of getting it out on “paper” these painful places in your life begin to heal.

Learning through Blogging

After you blog for a couple of years, you realize that one of the reasons you blog is because you learn by writing. Writing is not something you do to show off how much you know, but in order to investigate and explore certain ideas and interact with others about these ideas.
Then, after you get a few readers, some of them start to criticize you, and you are right back where you started, trying to learn humility through blogging.

My writing is cathartic, though I'm somewhat tired of being introduced as "you were a reporter, right?" Or, "you're a writer or something, right?"

Someone the other day asked me, "How many books have you written?" My answer is a bit of a puzzle itself. After deliberating, I said, "four written, two published." And I told them I was done.

Writing is a bit like pastoring which is a bit like leading. You have to have particularly thick skin to do any of them. People will like your stuff or not like your stuff and you have to go into it knowing that. I've never been particularly good with that. I suspect at this late stage I won't be.

So, I write for the 20 who read it. I write because I think if I didn't, the "were" in me will finally take over. No one ever, ever asks me if I'm a pastor, or if they do, they ask how is it going. Invariably I respond with numbers, which I so often rail against being the true measure of how things are going.

What's the point? I think this: There is a reason God informed and inspired the Word of God instead of keeping the oral history going. There is a reason people write.

Once I sent a short story to Stephen King. He wrote back, or at least someone did, and gave me this advice: "Writers write."  Short advice for some deep logic. Any writers out there would agree, however.