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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/14586
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I built and sold a business during my first decade of adulthood. During that period, I read a lot of business books published by the popular press. However, I didn't begin to succeed until I apprehended that the authors didn't write books to teach people how to successfully manage businesses; they wrote books to sell books (go figure). By definition, a person ignorant of a given topic doesn't know about that topic, and so s/he can't judge whether statements about that topic are true. Consequently, the feelings a given business book elicits seem to affect its sales much more than the efficacy of the methods it propounds affects them. If I could re-live my first decade of adulthood, I'd forgo most of the books that I read during that period, and read case-studies instead.

Moreover, it seems that successful fiction authors don't write books about writing fiction. Presumably, if the methods these books propound worked, their authors would be successful fiction writers. Nevertheless, even if some successful fiction authors do write these books, I can't think of anything, other than altruism, that would motivate them to share their fiction writing methods. Especially given that they're protected from accusations of dishonestly by the fact that we don't know whether they actually use the methods they propound.

In other words, do we know whether the methods propounded in books about writing fiction actually work; if so how do we know that?

Original score: 7