Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Advice comes from their story
In art there is never a right way. What works for one person doesn't mean it works for someone else. The danger is hearing that someone wrote it a certain way and was successful, so that is how it has to be done. It might work, but it might be the way it works for that one person.
Jay-Z shows the range. Most rappers Rick Rubin worked with spent a lot of time writing lyrics, while Jay-Z held verses in his memory as a beat looped. His process was totally different from anyone's.
People give advice with the best intentions. The way to use it is to swim deeply in your medium, hear as much information as possible from as many people as possible, hopefully conflicting, and then check in with yourself for as long as it takes. When you have done enough homework on the conflicting information, you can listen to yourself and feel good about the answer. If you don't know it yet, there hasn't been enough research.
Why does what worked for one person fail for others?
Advice drawn from successful people suffers from survivorship bias, since the people who tried the same method and failed rarely give interviews. The statistician Abraham Wald made the point in World War II, when military analysts proposed armoring the parts of returning bombers that had the most bullet holes. Wald showed that the planes hit in other places never returned, so those places needed the armor. The same logic applies to creative habits, where only the survivors are visible.
How different can writers' processes be?
Ernest Hemingway was reported to write standing at a typewriter set on a bookshelf. Truman Capote called himself a horizontal author and wrote lying down on a couch with a cigarette and coffee. Vladimir Nabokov drafted his novels on index cards that he shuffled into order. Each of the three produced celebrated work.
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