You can’t count on inspiration, but with a routine of constant, informal writing, you can approximate inspiration. That’s why I ask students to author blogs in the courses I teach. Constant writing is like physical exercise, or practicing an instrument. The more you do it, the closer it becomes to automatic. The closer writing becomes to automatic, the more room there is for a writer to develop and experiment. I used to ask my students to do this writing in private reading journals, which they’d use to respond to course texts, communicate with me, and work through ideas. Blogs, on the other hand, require students to write for an audience larger and more varied than a single teacher. As a result, student bloggers start to inspire each other. Inspiration is sometimes described as if it’s magical, bestowed by a benevolent muse. It sometimes feels this way, but that feeling is ephemeral. The image of a writer consorting with a muse suggests a private, quasi-mystical process that a writer experiences in solitude. Writing a blog is much less romantic. But authoring a blog makes a writer into an author, one who is making the practice of writing - in all its unromantic messiness - public. In the process, both inspiration and publication are demystified a little. My experience with course blogs has convinced me that students’ writing improves as a result.