Survivorship Bias

Today I listened to the Survivorship Bias episode of the podcast Writing Excuses (here). It was a discussion based on this blog post by Tobias Buckell. Interestingly, I first heard of Tobias Buckell on the Dead Robots Society Podcast. The take home message from both is that the advice given by writers on how to get published (and how to write, and how to sell ebooks) is anecdotal because you are only hearing how one person did it. Writing Excuses talked about how what got them published won't necessarily work now (a few years after). Mr Buckell goes on to say that without the data from the ones that didn't work, we're getting an incomplete picture.

While I have no problem with what was said by both blog and podcast (and I really like what both have to say), I think there is still potential value in the data. While listening to the podcast, I remembered something that was taught in a coaching volleyball class I took in college. In essence, when I look at someone writing about volleyball drills, run that information through the filter of what you know about principles of motor learning (skill acquisition/learning). Some drills just won't be effective at teaching a skill. Going a step further, take that information and see how it fits in with what skills correlate strongly with success in matches. If a drill is designed to teach a skill that has little importance to scoring points and winning the match, the team will be better served doing a drill that will teach something important/relevant. That is all well and good for volleyball, but it raises the question of how it relates to writing.

I think what I need to do as an aspiring writer is to look at the advice, and see what underlying principles are guiding the (largely procedural) advice. In the advice on how to get published, there are a couple principles in play. First, write good stuff. Second, get it in the hands of an editor. It seems a lot of the advice and how to data is geared toward the second, or at least that is how a lot of people seem to be reading it. If you manage to get your work into the hands of an editor, and it is garbage, the editor might not even finish the first page. First things first. Get your writing into shape, and then worry about getting it out there.

Something else I thought of is some advice I heard from Scott Sigler. He suggested learning from the "rap moguls" who started out selling CDs out of the trunks of their cars and are now millionaires. He even already distilled the advice down to that juicy underlying principle. That principle is hard work. Adding that to the list, and we have work really hard, make your work shine, and then find a way to get it into the hands of an editor. The details on how all of those individual elements happen are up in the air, and what works today might not work tomorrow, but find a way to do it. Find a way to do it, and don't skip to that third principle.