Here's a repost from the past. 

Writing is like sex. When you get the impulse to do it, you’re seldom in the right place, and when the atmosphere is sublime, you might not be in the mood. I suspect this accounts for the vast number of unsatisfying blogs written every day across America. 

So goes my theory about the mysterious impulses of the mind and body. Blogging is a mystery to me, a modern curiosity that is trying to find its place in the history of mankind’s literary arts. The percentage of people who write a blog is growing every day, and it's changing the art of the word.

I’m coming to understand the art of blogging as a hybrid of inclination, narcissism, and curiosity. Do I come to my screen as the ancients did with a quill, looking to shape and frame an idea, a thesis, an ideology? Does the spontaneity of the medium favor only freshly baked insights, or is it all right to offer the timeless truths of an essayist? Am I truly a writer—or am I, as they say, merely a Cat Blogger, someone who enjoys telling you that my cat did such and such today with the profound assurance that someone cares? (Cat Bloggers, by the way, aren’t new; they’ve been around for centuries, but their daily rhapsodies were mercifully trapped in little diaries with cheap aluminum keys).

When I get the impulse to think, I write. The two are inextricably bound together. The millions of bloggers around the world haven’t figured out quite what they want to say until they’ve said it, and that’s precisely the point of blogging. Writing helps us take all of the tangled pieces of intellectual thread and string in the bottom of the sewing basket and make something of it. If you’re Milton, you design a tapestry for a castle wall; if you’re Eddie Callahan with a MySpace page, you come up with a cheesy macramé dream catcher for your girlfriend. That’s the mystery of writing.

I used to get frustrated by the sheer numbers of bloggers in the universe (the Huffington Post, Politico and the Drudge Report alone have over a thousand contributors) and we’re just talking about the professional writers. What about Jim and Stacey and Ricardo and Desiree and Lulu—all sorting through their sewing baskets on BlogSpot and Xanga and Googleblog? How come they have an audience, too, when they can’t even use a semicolon?

But I’m softening to the egalitarian ideals of blogging, especially as I see young people sorting our their own thoughts through language. Writing makes you commit to an opinion—if only for the space between one Send button to the next—and this is good. You might not have captured the Big Idea without it, and if you find out you were wrong, you go back and hit delete. The selfish, beautiful, transforming thing about writing is that I don’t always have to borrow other’s thoughts; I can create some for myself. My spiritual impulses—those prompted by prayer, love, or scripture—give me lots more pieces of string to work with. Lots of people create lousy thoughts, lazy thoughts, and borrowed thoughts, but writing helps us figure out which is which.

On the other side, such freedom makes it infinitely difficult to commit to the unchanging truths of a sacred text. The interpretation of the Bible, for example, is now more like a public swimming hole, where everyone performs his stupid tricks in the deep end without a lifeguard. We don’t know the difference between matters of opinion and matters of doctrine, and when that happens, somebody’s going to drown. Language alone cannot decipher the difference.. Don’t pretend that God needs to read your blog (He saw the first draft before you typed one letter), and sometimes even your mother might not even care, but that doesn't mean you should quit. Maybe you’re the one who needed to see what your mind was up to today. I say that’s good. Our souls have things to say, and sometimes it’s helpful to take a look at our thoughts in black and white.

In the 1800s Samuel Butler wrote: “The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.” His dated metaphor still works today. It's often easier to read everyone else's opinions and sway in the breezes of rhetoric rather than owning your own thoughts. I like Butler’s admonition: nurture your own cow and drink the milk warm and frothy, right from your own barn. It might have a short shelf life, but the hard work can be delicious.