Gurus #15: Embrace Humiliation, No Fear: Arthur Boorman

1. A great failure story
2.The funny story of my recent humiliation
3. How this inspires others

 Yesterday in my yoga practice, I was channelling this guy (by which I mean, I was flailing my arms and falling over, clumsy, feeling fat):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9FSZJu448

(a reader gave a heads-up that this video link didn't work for him -- try Googling "inspirational yoga video" and it will probably be the first hit. Or, try "Arthur Boorman yoga." Thanks for the tip, Frank Huangfu.)

That is one of the most inspirational yoga videos ever, because it shows the true power of yoga. It starts not with a skinny, strong, flexible person, but with someone who is broken, fat, falling over, clumsy. (If you want to see the end result, I won’t spoil it – I challenge you to feel nothing if you watch it to the end.)

This guy, Arthur Boorman, starts off recording his failure, as a veteran who doctors say will never walk again. He’s fat, he’s out of shape. But fearless. He wasn’t afraid to be embarrassed. He recorded the whole damn journey on his yoga mat, including the times he fell over. It is through his failure and his clumsiness and ineptitude that we are able to be so incredibly inspired.

Today when I wobbled on my yoga mat and waved my arms just like Arthur Boorman did in Warrior Pose (when he was getting better at it), I felt inspired. Instead of being frustrated with my wobble, I thought, “I’m channelling that guy, and he’s a guru.” His youtube video cast light in my life today. Thank you, guru.

(Actually -- full disclosure, I remember falling over in my first six months of yoga classes, too -- a lot! And I still fall over sometimes. But when you look at Arthur Boorman, you see that falling over is no reason to quit. Stand up and come back to class.)

Humiliation is good for the soul. I have always said so.

I had a chance to practice some nice humiliation this past weekend, too. I had a whole room of people laughing at me, more than they laughed at anyone else that hour. They laughed extra hard because at the time, I was anonymous, so they could be as cruel and no-holds-barred as they liked. Later that day, a woman I sat beside in another conference session thanked me for inspiring her by how I reacted. :)

You see? You can be a guru by being embarrassed. Just do it well.Here’s the little tale of how I did that.

So. The context of this tale is a wonder of a human activity called “Live Action Slush.” The deal is that writers bring just the first page of a novel to a conference session. A reader reads out each entry in turn, and a panel of judges listen (along with about a hundred people in the audience) and put up their hand when they would reject the manuscript.

It’s fun. It’s not for the faint of heart. My son had taken my one-pager to the Live Action Slush – Romance version the day before, but I hadn’t been able to attend because I was teaching a session about editing during the same hour. Anyway, he wrote down notes, and said that the reaction was generally positive.

I figured, hey, I’d like to see this process, and my novel is a historical fantasy time-travel romance, so why not try it on in the historical section? What the heck.

(Sorry for the long noun string for the genre… it was only mean to be a historical time travel romance, but the dragon who lives on the property where the heroine lives said he wanted to jump in, and I didn’t figure it was right to say no, as I’ve been meaning to write him into a book for years, and after all, he already lives there… and really, he was right. He’s been a very handy addition. So it's a historical time travel fantasy romance.)

The conference was so huge that it was easy to be bewildered, and I had taken care of getting my son to where he needed to be and had sort of dizzily realized only after a while that I was missing the Historical edition of the Live Action Slush (with Diana Gabaldon and David B. Coe on the panel).

So I went to the Historical Live Action Slush session, and I was late. Being late is often a good way to start off being humiliated, if you’re aiming for humiliation. (I wasn't. Being late was not actually in my plan, it was simple ineptitude.) I thought I had probably missed my chance to put in my page, but that’s okay, I enjoyed listening to the critiques of the other pages.

But then, hurray! The reader said that she’d noticed that people had come in late, and that we were welcome to bring our pages up. So I did. As I was walking back to my chair, she mentioned, “you people are brave, because now we know who you are, bringing your pages up!”

I just spun around and said,

“that’s alright. A little humiliation every day is good for the soul.”

Folks laughed.

Then I sat down and listened some more. Somebody had written a scene where the hero appeared to have four or five hands because of all the actions the hands were simultaneously doing, but then when the author admitted that it was a dream sequence, someone said, oh, well, it’s fine to have five hands in a dream sequence! Everyone laughed along.

Someone else had written a scene in ancient Rome, with some wonderful imagery with red mud. One of the panelists got obsessed with the idea that she didn’t think the mud in Rome would have been red. Meh. You need to take some people with a wheelbarrow of salt. She was off-base and wasting our time (she was similarly distracted and long-winded about her erroneous assumptions about tiny details for all the manuscripts, actually – not an ideal panelist. In another manuscript, she started obsessing about whether the author had chosen the correct type of chain mail, and one of the other panelists (no, two of them!) finally piped up and said, "come on, give the author some credit for having done their research!").

When the reader started to read my scene, which starts with a kiss, nervous laughter started almost immediately. It wasn’t what they expected to follow the cool red mud ancient-Rome manuscript. Ms. Erroneous Details put her hand up straight away, and said that she didn’t like sex and she couldn’t stand for books to start with sex. (It wasn’t sex, it was kissing, but she assumed.)

And then someone said that I couldn’t use the word “supple” for lips that are kissing. Hm. (In the editing panel the day before, I encouraged writers to always question editorial advice that doesn't ring true immediately with them. Therefore, I have since run that past my largish group of editor colleagues, and they said, essentially, “meh. Nonsense.” Nonetheless... it was Diana Gabaldon who said that, just before she said she's written four million pages describing her characters' long-term relationship, and when I looked back at my manuscript, I did take that word out in the first paragraph... but it might not always be my policy to do so.)

While the critique was going on, the laughter in the room was pretty loud. The crowd had gotten raucous with the five-hand descriptions and though they’d quieted with the red mud manuscript, they were raucous again, and the panel of critics had turned into a panel of comics.

And my manuscript was the fodder. When they were done shredding it (they’d only read a few lines, actually, so how hurt could I be?), they dared the author to identify themselves, rather assuming nobody would want to.

But it was no problem for me. I spoke up right away.

“It’s okay, I’m the one who said that humiliation is good for the soul.”

I explained that actually, I was not too worried by their criticism,because they same manuscript had been enthusiastically received on Friday by a romance editor, and had been well-received in the Live Action Slush – Romance edition. I also had reader-fans who are already madly in love with Massimo, the hero (they didn't object to his lips being supple... nonetheless, today I admit I edited that word out before sending it along where it was requested).

I concluded by mentioning that since humiliation is good for the soul, my soul had just received a pretty good cleaning!

That made people laugh. Laughing is good.

So. Water off a duck’s back really. I had resilience because I knew I had good feedback elsewhere. The more you put yourself out there, the less scary it is. Some people will love you, and others will not. The world has always been, and will always be, thus.

And because I was able to laugh it off easily in public, some other writers took the time to tell me that it made them feel braver about doing it themselves. That they realized they could do it and not be deadly serious about the results. That it was worth trying.

They said,

"thanks. Thanks for lighting the way by laughing at yourself."

I think this little tale is a great illustration of that old saying:

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will always fail.”

By which I mean to say, people who don’t want to read romance, just don’t want to read romance. An excellent lesson re-learned. Perhaps my notion of submitting a cross-genre romance in the other genre was a bit crazy... but maybe not. Maybe I just hit comedy hour.

But you know what? In the Kobo workshop, the presenter was very clear about what sells best: romance. So it's okay if the woman who said she doesn’t like sex never reads my work. The women who love re-reading Massimo’s kisses can just keep right on doing that, too.

Chacun a son gout. 
(each to their own taste)

Et vive le difference. 
(and hurray for differences!)

I wouldn’t have learned as much if I had missed my chance to be embarrassed.

So be brave -- you might inspire someone when you fail the first twenty-two times. Keep at it anyway, and don't worry about your red face. We're all in the same boat some time.