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The Skiver's Guide
Skiving is getting out of things you do not want to do. It is shirking work and avoiding all boring things. It is a skill no one should be without! It is also an art, which can be carried to a high pitch of perfection. This book is designed to help beginners learn the skills of skiving and also to help those who have been skiving for years to carry these skills to new heights. It is the result of over two decades of painful research and contains secrets not hitherto revealed.
111 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
249 people want to read
About the author
Diana Wynne Jones
163 books12.1k followersDiana Wynne Jones was a celebrated British writer best known for her inventive and influential works of fantasy for children and young adults. Her stories often combined magical worlds with science fiction elements, parallel universes, and a sharp sense of humor. Among her most beloved books are Howl's Moving Castle, the Chrestomanci series, The Dalemark Quartet, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and the satirical The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Her work gained renewed attention and readership with the popularity of the Harry Potter series, to which her books have frequently been compared.
Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous accolades throughout her career, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Mythopoeic Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2004, Howl's Moving Castle was adapted into an acclaimed animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, further expanding her global audience.
Jones studied at Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She began writing professionally in the 1960s and remained active until her death in 2011. Her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed posthumously by her sister Ursula Jones.
Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous accolades throughout her career, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Mythopoeic Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2004, Howl's Moving Castle was adapted into an acclaimed animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, further expanding her global audience.
Jones studied at Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She began writing professionally in the 1960s and remained active until her death in 2011. Her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed posthumously by her sister Ursula Jones.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 23, 2026
Diana Wynne Jones’s The Skiver’s Guide, like her later The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, is touted as a nonfiction book, but it’s as much nonfiction as <>Monty Python and the Holy Grail<> is a historical documentary about searching for a fabled holy relic.
The result of ‘twenty painful years of research’, this is a humorous handbook on how to avoid onerous tasks, concoct excuses, and avoid being found out. In a way it’s the equivalent for youngsters of the once popular series of Bluffer’s Guides, featuring titles like Bluff Your Way in Economics, The Bluffer’s Guide to Law, and – my personal vademecum – Bluff Your Way in Teaching.
Seven chapters cover everything you ever needed to know about degrees of fibbing, skiving at home and at school, coping with your contemporaries, and the strategies to adopt with approaching family holidays and the feigning of illnesses. Again, like Jones’s 'Tough Guide' this feels like more a book to dip into than read from cover to cover, but either way would work for would-be shirkers; luckily for you I’ve read it so you can avoid having to – no excuses needed!
As a lifelong practising skiver, with grown-up kids who early on perfected the art of shirking, I recognised the contexts and the strategies outlined here. Despite its humorous tone Jones is no slouch at producing a very detailed handbook covering the hows, whys and wherefores of skiving; ironically, she demonstrates that the art and skill needed to avoid onerous tasks themselves require research, hard work, and commitment if one is to be successful.
Early on Jones gives an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of the Golden Rules of Skiving: ten things you should never do, and eleven things you should always do. Examples include ‘Never obey any command without examining it closely for loopholes’ and ‘Always drift away when work is being discussed.’ A chapter on fibbing includes such categories as Excuses, Ripe Falsehoods, The Smoke Screen, and Lying Without Words, while a ‘short’ list of common excuses runs to nearly four pages in this edition.
I hope I’ve given enough indication of how thorough this guide is. However, despite it coming over as parody, spoofing self-help books and the like, I detect a more serious subtext, implicit or otherwise. You might think this guide is designed as an encouragement to remove oneself from any responsibility to friends, family, or society as a whole but I think Jones – by exaggerating, thus making it seem like hard work – gets the thoughtful reader to consider the morality of not making a contribution to the social groupings that sustain them.
It also, to my mind at least, indirectly lays bare corporate and political skiving: when we consider how entities like polluting industries, privatised utilities, and elected politicians make excuses for the harm they do to the public they pretend to serve – not protecting us adequately during pandemics, dumping untreated sewage in waterways, covering up scandals over defrauding employees, failing to invest in maintenance of equipment, or lying about ‘forever chemicals’ slowly poisoning us – we start to realise skiving is not funny any more.
Those twenty years of ‘painful’ research that Jones refers to? That was courtesy of her youngest son, Colin Burrows, who’s acknowledged in the dedication as someone “with [sic] whose help this book would never have been written,” who happened to have been born twenty years before the book went to the publishers. I’m sure that, despite now being a distinguished academic, Burrows values the time he spent honing his skiving while unwittingly collaborating with his mother for this complex but sobering manual.
The result of ‘twenty painful years of research’, this is a humorous handbook on how to avoid onerous tasks, concoct excuses, and avoid being found out. In a way it’s the equivalent for youngsters of the once popular series of Bluffer’s Guides, featuring titles like Bluff Your Way in Economics, The Bluffer’s Guide to Law, and – my personal vademecum – Bluff Your Way in Teaching.
Seven chapters cover everything you ever needed to know about degrees of fibbing, skiving at home and at school, coping with your contemporaries, and the strategies to adopt with approaching family holidays and the feigning of illnesses. Again, like Jones’s 'Tough Guide' this feels like more a book to dip into than read from cover to cover, but either way would work for would-be shirkers; luckily for you I’ve read it so you can avoid having to – no excuses needed!
As a lifelong practising skiver, with grown-up kids who early on perfected the art of shirking, I recognised the contexts and the strategies outlined here. Despite its humorous tone Jones is no slouch at producing a very detailed handbook covering the hows, whys and wherefores of skiving; ironically, she demonstrates that the art and skill needed to avoid onerous tasks themselves require research, hard work, and commitment if one is to be successful.
Early on Jones gives an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of the Golden Rules of Skiving: ten things you should never do, and eleven things you should always do. Examples include ‘Never obey any command without examining it closely for loopholes’ and ‘Always drift away when work is being discussed.’ A chapter on fibbing includes such categories as Excuses, Ripe Falsehoods, The Smoke Screen, and Lying Without Words, while a ‘short’ list of common excuses runs to nearly four pages in this edition.
I hope I’ve given enough indication of how thorough this guide is. However, despite it coming over as parody, spoofing self-help books and the like, I detect a more serious subtext, implicit or otherwise. You might think this guide is designed as an encouragement to remove oneself from any responsibility to friends, family, or society as a whole but I think Jones – by exaggerating, thus making it seem like hard work – gets the thoughtful reader to consider the morality of not making a contribution to the social groupings that sustain them.
It also, to my mind at least, indirectly lays bare corporate and political skiving: when we consider how entities like polluting industries, privatised utilities, and elected politicians make excuses for the harm they do to the public they pretend to serve – not protecting us adequately during pandemics, dumping untreated sewage in waterways, covering up scandals over defrauding employees, failing to invest in maintenance of equipment, or lying about ‘forever chemicals’ slowly poisoning us – we start to realise skiving is not funny any more.
Those twenty years of ‘painful’ research that Jones refers to? That was courtesy of her youngest son, Colin Burrows, who’s acknowledged in the dedication as someone “with [sic] whose help this book would never have been written,” who happened to have been born twenty years before the book went to the publishers. I’m sure that, despite now being a distinguished academic, Burrows values the time he spent honing his skiving while unwittingly collaborating with his mother for this complex but sobering manual.
July 5, 2009
Entertaining, though not the fantasy I come to expect (I knew from the description it wasn't, but still). A little young for me, or I'd have liked it better. Still clever.
July 17, 2011
Barely a book at all; it reads as though DWJ were bored one afternoon, spent a half-hour observing her kids, and then another half-hour knocking this out. Mildly amusing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews