Richard Skinner: A Masterclass?
A review by :
A fountain pen. Two and a half hours at an internet cafe. Thirty packets of custard creams. Each of these would have made a better investment in a fledging writing career than Richard Skinner’s Masterclass. The ten pounds I frittered away on sixty minutes of Skinner provided no useful tool to help the process of writing. Nor was he a worldwide database full of applicable writing wisdom. Worst of all, his talk contained absolutely no nutritional value.
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What Skinner did provide was a scrap of card, and bloated self indulgence. That, he brought in spades.
Dear reader, I have never been so bitterly disappointed in anything since one appalling Christmas morning – and at least that was mitigated by the ready availability of eggnog. There was only one facet that made the experience notable; the sheer complexity of the ensuing disaster. Skinner’s failure can be likened to the destructive power of a nuclear holocaust: incredible in scale, destructive down to the last detail.
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I could critique this apocalyptic failure with a conventional review. However, I hold faith in the wisdom of idioms, specifically “there’s more than one way to Skinner a cat” and “the punishment should fit the crime”. With this in mind, I’ve decided to use what I’ve learnt from the man to teach you something else.
Something Skinner does very well.
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Richard Skinner: How Not To Give A Masterclass
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1. Your own vanity comes before the necessity of delivering a good product
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Like it or not, literature and finance are inextricably tied together. A literature festival event has many purposes, but for the discerning consumer it is a product first. Which means it is subject to the expectations that consumers have for any other product.
The Birmingham Literature Festival (BLF) advertised a multi-faceted Masterclass, that promised inspirational ruminations on the ‘duty’ of novelist alongside practical writing advice. Complete with ‘frameworks, strategies and stimuli’, delivered through ‘charm and rigour’, the event proposed to be a spiritually fulfilling, entertaining and educational experience. In essence, this was an event to remind you of all the joys of being a writer.
How wrong that turned out be.
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On the spiritual side of things, Skinner had many ideas about the grander nature of stories, and the role of writers – but they seem depressingly deterministic. Skinner claims that ‘novels grow inside you, rather like planets’. A charming analogy, but one which removes the writer entirely as an active agent. If novels, like planets, accrete mass based on unknowable and complex laws, how important is the writer’s influence? Had I met Skinner as a child, he would have stomped out my dream of becoming an author. I wanted to be a creator of tall tales, not a simple “conduit” for autonomous packages of information. Effectively, he turns every creative writer into mere literary delivery-boys.
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This ideology doesn’t exactly compel me to run to my typewriter, and that’s without considering further implications. Not only has Skinner created a scenario in which the writer’s skill, talent or desire to succeed doesn’t matter, he’s also turned the literary scene into a lottery. According to him, every writer-conduit contains novels inside of them that are “already written”. However, what if that novel simply isn’t good? Or if it’s not marketable, or if it’s very marketable but lacks literary value? What if the great hand of literary fate has gifted you a novel with morals that contradict your own? Or the next Mein Kampf? More importantly, if “all the novels inside of you are already written”, what am I paying ten pounds for?
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Certainly not for the entertainment value. Philosophical differences can be reconciled, but being such an aggressive bore is unforgiveable. My notes describe it best, the first word I wrote was:
Dull.
followed by
Braggadocious.
That’s because the first ten minutes of this hour-long class was unashamed marketing, peppered with masturbatory self-congratulation. Even in an increasingly consumerist society, dedicating a full sixth of a product’s content to advertising is beyond belief. If Skinner had jazzed up the rest of the event, we could have made amends. Instead, he chose to continue by
Speaking at the speed of continental drift.
I can only interpret this as a way to fill the next twenty minutes; what was said in that time took the form of an infinite, unfocussed ramble that trailed purposelessly from place to place, like a slug dipped in ink.
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These criss-cross streams of consciousness didn’t create a conducive learning environment, but that’s okay. There wasn’t much knowledge to glean anyway, and a lot of what was there, was wrong.
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This was first apparent in an exchange about the novel, Stoner. Skinner uses Stoner to illustrate the importance of finding a story “worth telling” but in doing so, he’s completely missed the point. Stoner is a novel written almost in spite of itself, written because its story, of an overcautious, conflict-averse university lecturer, isn’t worth telling. It’s a love affair with anti-climax, not the gossip-worthy anecdote Stoner seems to believe all novels should be.
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Worse than malformed interpretations, is redundancy. Kurt Vonnegut’s eight tips share a many similarities with Skinner’s list and are available for free online. They’re written by the author of Slaughterhouse 5, a technically marvellous novel that has left an impact on post war Western Literature. With this, and a wealth of other free writing wisdom available online, why would I ever pay for the less-accomplished Skinner?
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If that weren’t enough, all of the information given in the supposed Masterclass is available online, for no monetary charge – from Skinner! Yes, in a bizarre turn of events, the man has written a Guardian article which contains much of the content given in the masterclass. Showing he cares more about the Guardian than paying customers, more detail is lavished on his article than on his premium audience.
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Skinner’s Masterclass is completely outperformed by its competitors, and fails to meet any of its promises. It is an utter waste of your time and money. A terrible product made either by a vain fool or a con artist.
I’m not sure which is worse.
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2. Hammer home your snobbery, screw the BLF’s reputation
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I wouldn’t be writing this if Skinner’s Masterclass was just a waste of time and money. Humans happily waste their limited time, and the success of lotteries worldwide shows that we couldn’t care less about making intelligent investments.
No, there are further reaching implications.
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See, in most markets, it’s rare that a single shoddy product will do lasting damage to the entire industry. However, the Literature Festival is different. Its continued success on good first impressions.For comparison, most people have a strong concept of how a restaurant works, and what makes a visit to one worthwhile. Having a poor experience at a restaurant would be unlikely to turn customers away from the entire industry.
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On the other hand, the BLF was an entirely unique experience for me and many of my fellow attendees. Literature lovers can go their whole lives without ever attending a festival dedicated to celebrating them, because of the solitary way that literature is typically enjoyed. Even when bookworms start to miss other humans, literary festivals pale in popularity when compared to other social ways of enjoying literature, such as Goodreads or Booktube. As a result, the quality of the first event attended will be taken as representative of the whole festival by an unknowing first-timer, despite the variety of events available.
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What impression does Skinner’s Masterclass give? When he dismisses an audience question? How about when he asks (repeatedly) “Does that chime with you?”, just to make sure we can follow his oh-so-clever meanderings? What about when the first desire to yawn sets in?
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I’ll tell you. Skinner is nothing but a confirmation of their worst fears about the literature festival.They’ll see it as a celebration of stuffed shirts that talk to hear their own voice, and never come back again. Through careless snobbery, people like Skinner could damage literary festivals permanently. Worse, given the limited funding available, the literary festival fringe culture might not have the resilience to survive.
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3. Speak from your ego, not for the Birmingham writing community
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Most literary festival events finish with applause, and polite affirmations of admiration. Skinner was instead confronted by a formidable-looking woman, who told him exactly what she thought of him.
Oh dear. If only he’d thought to do his research, this conflict could have been avoided. Critic Leo Schofield writes this on literary festivals:
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“a festival must first and foremost reflect the character of its host city. It should also meet the needs of the citizens and visitors, challenge their habits and confront their assumptions”
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I cannot stress the importance of this enough. Every literary festival event should engage with and celebrate the local community of literature-lovers. If you don’t, you run the risk of alienating the very people you’ve come to help.
That’s the true appeal of the Masterclass. It’s supposed to be how the exceptionally successful can give back to writing communities.
Unfortunately, this idealism can be easily exploited by the morally bankrupt. When this happens, the result is a sort of literary kangaroo court, in which alternative viewpoints are suppressed in favour of an autocratic narrative.
Within this room-sized dystopia, Skinner’s atrocities against the Birmingham writing community include, but are not limited to:
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Shushing questioners because he didn’t care to answer their questions.
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Dismissing a writer’s proposed plotline, because it deviated slightly from Skinner’s prescriptive writing tips.
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Speaking over audience members.
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Answering a career inquiry with “it’s a long story”, before moving onto explaining his ‘books are planets’ theory again.
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Not answering questions at all.
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You might think that calling these actions “atrocities” is exaggeration – but think of the damage this does to aspiring writers. For one, silencing, or dismissing a writer that thinks differently has horrific implications, particularly at a festival that champions minority voices, such as the #MeToo movement and the Black British Women Writers Network. It has sinsister overtones of colonialism and patriarchy; monsters that contemporary literature is supposed to have vanquished.
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If we’re talking about restrictive frameworks, let’s address those ludicrously prescriptive ‘writing tips’. (For which, I’ve written a handy translation for those of you who don’t speak Skinner).
The problem here is they enforce a narrow, story-first style onto novel writing. Which is great – if you want swathes of homogenous lookalike novels. No, novels are a place for varied and experimental prose, that rebels against the canon. Story can come last in the order of considerations. Many successful writers have avoided these rules. Joyce breaks them all before breakfast.
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So how can this be beneficial to the writing community? The only way he could sabotage aspiring writers more is if he unleashed a whole book of this faulty ideology.
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4. If a writer wants to succeed, rob them first (by misusing an inherently flawed institution)
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While I hate, hate, hate to give this bore any kind of respite, the fault can’t be placed entirely on Richard Skinner’s shoulders. According to workshop host AL Kennedy, the Masterclass has pure intentions. It wants to be ‘a chance for a bunch of interested parties to explore something together in stimulating ways and then go home all the better for it’.
Sounds lovely, right?
But there are inherent ‘horrible temptations’ threatening to undo everything. The Masterclass ‘master’ has incredible influence over his students, which can lead to bullying, mocking and all kinds of ‘wrongness and corruption’. Kennedy likens bad Masterclasses to the Stanford Prison Experiment, and having been under the Skinner regime, I’m inclined to agree.
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Can we wholly blame our “masters”? Leave alone the narcissistic tendencies inspired by the term “master”, and think about the immense pressure comes with it. Calling ordinary people "masters" might give the joy of omnipotence, but also pressure of necessary omniscience.
Under these conditions, can we blame Skinner for his mistakes?
Frankly, yes.
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Because the man didn’t even try.
Not only does his Masterclass suffer from all the flaws common to Masterclasses, but it’s also a bad Masterclass. Skinner’s event was ten minutes of pure marketing, twenty minutes of unprepared lecture time, and thirty minutes of Q&A. In no way does that resemble a class of any kind, nor the workshop format of the typical Masterclasses . Skinner has hijacked the label, to use its prestigious associations for a covert marketing campaign.
In an odd twist of fate, not only has Skinner proved himself to be a poor representation of the literary festival, but also of the Masterclass. He’s harmful to everything he touches, like an inverted King Midas.
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Is there anything left to redeem him?
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Listening to him was better than standing under that day's winter rainstorm.
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...probably.
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