A Question about Blogging and Creativity

[nayad]

Thank you to everyone who posted questions for me! Today's question comes from melindadansky:

How do you expect blogging to help in other creative areas of your life?I'm not entirely certain that it will, but I think it might, and I'm trying to discover the best ways to give it a chance to do so

Comments

[greyduck]

What do I get out of it? An outlet. Stuff bounces around in my head, and I have to let it out somewhere.

What am I giving people? Hopefully a laugh, something to think about, maybe even both at once.

Does it enhance my creativity? I have no idea. Quantifying, let alone calibrating, my creativity seems nearly impossible lately...

[jimhines]

What do I get? Community, plain and simple. Fellow writers, readers, and fans. More than publicity or anything else, that community is what's most valuable to me.

What am I giving people? Heck if I know. Hopefully some amusement. Some "pay it forward" info about the writing biz. Interesting things to think about.

I'm not sure about whether blogging enhances or otherwise affects my creativity. At best, I'd say that by posting my word count, I help to motivate myself to stay on track with the current project. Thoguh this was more of an issue 10 years ago. These days, deadlines from my publisher also provide good motivation :-)

[agilebrit]

I don't know how many times I've been working out a knotty problem, started an LJ post about it...and come up with the solution. It's like typing it out opens a different circuit in my brain (left-brain, right-brain? who knows) and I can think about the problem from a different direction.

Like others, I get a sense of community from LJ, a glimpse into the lives of other people far away. I don't know if anyone gets much out of what I post, but the Weekly Word Counts and State of the Subs posts are a way of keeping me honest and making sure I don't slack off on my professional responsibilities too much. And I like to share snippets because I'm an attention whore that way. Not that many people comment...

[fingle]

Speaking of attention whores, I just went through my last fifty posts to get some idea of the trend, and apparently I love to show off about how good I've got it! It's mostly all happy, happy stuff and pictures from my life. It seems to be loaded forty-percent ballet photos and stories, and sixty percent everything else, so I guess I'm mostly all about my latest hobby, or fixation, or art form, whatever you'd like to call it!

I am having a fine time of life, though, and I guess I just like to brag. When people say "Have a nice day" I usually say "Oh, I always do!" and I mean it... I am the luckiest man on the planet.

[slweippert]

If you post on LiveJournal or any other blog site, what do you get out of it? What are you giving people when you post? Do you feel that blogging enhances your creativity in any way, and if so, how?

Oh wow, I never thought it out before.
Well, I read my friends' posts to keep up with them, I don't see some of my friends more than about once a month so their posts keep me informed on what's going on.
I post to LJ to let people know things that are going on, where I am in the stories I'm writing, and to get feedback on ideas I might have about my stories. It helps me write because I've fixed writer's block more than once by posting something about my plot and getting astute replies. I have really cool people on my friends list. :) I appreciate my friends who follow along.