Rather, what this is is a PARODY of those Master Class things so heavily advertised on the Internet. People with more money than they know what to do with are getting yet more of that money by doing an instructional video of their area of expertise. Writers Neil Gaiman, David Baldacci, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates are in on it. Three of them have my utmost respect, and one of them has my grudging admiration. (I leave it to the reader to guess Who’s Who.) Steve Martin teaches Comedy. So-And-So teaches Graphic Design. Whatshername is your new instructor for Profound Obscurity.

Not that it’s not a good idea. Who wouldn’t want to learn from one of their Heroes? The entertainment value alone would be immense. And anything that may contain a Clue, that X-Factor that turns strugglers into Superstars, may well be worth looking into.

But what nags at me is something Robert Mitchum said about people going to acting schools: “It’s like trying to learn to be tall.”

Long before these Master Classes came to be, Stephen King gave us Stephen King on Writing. It received well-deserved praise for its wisdom, and my own approbation for King’s sharing of the nuts and bolts of becoming good at a craft. He went into detail about his rejections, his slow acquisition of savvy, and the REwriting process, which really separates the wannabes from the doingits. I haven’t seen any of the Master Classes of the four writers I mentioned above, but I’ve seen all of their trailers, and all of them will have some overlap with the soil that Stephen King has already plowed.

The image I’ve posted above is something I have already put, in slightly different form due to a different scan/photoedit process, on Instagram and Facebook. I advised my readers on those media that anyone who really wanted a Master Class on Acrostic Poetry need only do an Internet search on the strings “Gary Bowers” and “acrostic poetry.” When I make blog posts like this one I put tags specific to the post; this post will have the tags “Gary Bowers” and “acrostic poetry” and “Master Class” and “Stephen King on Writing.” I might throw in the celebrity names I also mentioned, but probably not. Their fans might be disappointed that they are mentioned so peripherally. But a “Gary Bowers” and “acrostic poetry” search ought to yield hundreds of examples of my work, and the examples, plus the clues I leave on the image above, should be all the Master Class from me that you’ll ever need. 🙂