This is my 200th blog post.

I wish I could say I began with a grand plan — that I knew what this blog would become and where all those words would lead me.

I didn’t. I simply had things I wanted to say.

I wrote about theatre, playwrights, actors, audiences and the strange machinery that turns words on a page into something alive. I wrote about work I admired, work that disappointed me and work I couldn’t recommend but couldn’t forget.

Along the way, the blog became a record of what held my attention.

Not every post came easily. Some fought me from the first sentence to the last. Some attracted attention. Others disappeared into the digital wilderness, where I assume they are living together quite happily.

But every post required me to sit down and decide what I thought.

We often believe we know what we think until we try to put it into words. Then the contradictions appear. Strong opinions encounter inconvenient facts. Writing forces us to look again.

It also teaches us to finish.

A play can take years to write, revise, rehearse and revise again. A blog post offers a smaller, more immediate satisfaction. You follow an idea, shape it as well as you can and send it into the world.

Then you begin the next one.

Reaching 200 posts has taught me that inspiration matters less than persistence. Writing regularly means beginning when the idea is incomplete, the opening is wrong and you are not certain there is anything worth saying.

Sometimes the act of writing reveals the subject. The piece you thought you were writing gives way to the piece that needed to be written.

To everyone who has read, shared or responded to one of these posts: thank you. Writing may be solitary, but being read makes it a conversation.

I don’t know what the next 200 posts will contain. There will undoubtedly be more theatre, more unpopular opinions and more questions without tidy answers.

For now, I’m allowing myself to acknowledge the number.

Two hundred posts. Two hundred attempts to make an idea clear. Two hundred occasions when I stared at an empty page and refused to let it remain empty.

The blank page will return soon enough.

And so will I.