Friday evening, I heard Rob Bell speak for the first of three times that weekend. Fresh off his trip to Seattle where he had spent a couple of days with my uncle and on panels with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he talked a couple of times about the thrill of sharing the stage with them.
He opened his talk by wondering about how strange it is to talk about writing, and read the quote (often attributed to Thelonious Monk), “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
He explained the process of how he wrote his first book, Velvet Elvis (with his Velvet Elvis painting, which inspired the book’s title, leaning against his chair). First, he tried giving a friend, an established author, his material to turn into a book, but when he read it, it just sounded to him like his friend had stolen his work. So then he tried dictating it to a court stenographer, which didn’t work, and a couple other methods, before, “I came to the awful realization that I was going to actually have to write this book.” He quoted Gene Fowler, “Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” But we write because we have no other choice, “we do the work because there is something inside of us that we have to get out or we will spontaneously combust.”
One of the things that Rob is most often criticized for is who he quotes. So, following that train of thought, I now have even more reason to like him. In the middle of his talk, he quoted a paragraph from the latest book by my favorite author, Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark. When he said Buechner’s name, I cheered, and he asked, “Are there other Buechner fans here?” A lot of hands went up, and he said, “Man, I am with my people.”
He said, when you write, “you have an edit button. Turn it off.” He explained his process, saying he will frequently write something two or three different ways, trying to find the best way to say it, and then pick the best one later when he is in the editing process.
He talked about the “tension of the new”, saying “tension is your friend.” And sometimes, to follow through, to get your work out, you have to have “intestinal fortitude.” And, “Don’t type as if people are going to read what you’re writing.”
Rob was using powerpoint during his talk, and at one point, he said, “Some of you are worried about letting other people see what you have written because they might think you’re strange.” As he finished that sentence, with perfect timing (which he later reveled in), he advanced to the next slide, which said simply, “Maybe you are.”