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Do you wince when you hear about the success of other writers? It’s likely you’re just suffering from availability bias…
You’ve probably never heard of the availability bias. But it’s been running most of our writing lives for years.
Here’s how it works: When we try to judge how common or likely something is, our brains don’t run a proper statistical analysis. That would take too long and cost too much energy. Instead, we reach for whatever example comes to mind most easily. The more readily we can picture something, the more real and frequent it feels.
Researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman first described this in 1973. It’s one of the most well-documented cognitive biases we have.
And writers, specifically, get hammered by it.
The examples you remember
Think about the last time you heard about a writer’s path. A book deal that went viral. A debut novel written in six weeks during a maternity leave. An overnight bestseller. A writer who said they never got blocked, never doubted themselves, just sat down and worked.
Those stories stick. They’re dramatic.
What doesn’t spread: the writer who spent four years on a manuscript, trunked it, started over, struggled through every chapter, revised 40 times and eventually published a good book that sold modestly. That story is far more common. But it doesn’t feel real.
Your brain now has a filing cabinet full of the exceptional cases and almost nothing representing the ordinary ones. Every time you sit down to write and find it hard, your brain pulls from that file. It compares you to the vivid examples you can most easily recall. And you come up short.
What this does to writers
I see this constantly in the people I coach. A writer spends two hours on a paragraph and decides they must not be cut out for this. A memoirist gets stuck on structure and concludes, privately, that real writers don’t struggle this way. A novelist reads an interview with someone who drafts fast and clean and thinks: something is wrong with me.
Nothing is wrong with you. Your sample is skewed.
The writers you’re comparing yourself to are the ones who made the news. They represent a tiny fraction of writing experiences. You are comparing your everyday life to other people’s highlight reels, and your brain is telling you the highlight reels are normal.
The specific ways this bias shows up
Availability bias distorts your sense of timeline. You’ve absorbed a handful of famous fast-writing stories, so spending a year on a first draft feels like failure. In reality, a year on a first draft is perfectly ordinary.
It distorts your sense of struggle. Writing is hard for almost everyone, almost all of the time. But struggle doesn’t make the news. Ease and speed do. So, ease and speed feel like the standard, when they’re the exception.
It distorts your sense of rejection. You hear about the books that sold on first submission. You rarely hear about the ones that collected 60 rejections before finding a home. The 60-rejection story is the more accurate picture of how publishing works, but your brain doesn’t have 60 vivid examples of it to draw on.
And it distorts your sense of output. A few very productive writers dominate the conversation. These are the people who publish a book a year and who write 5,000 words every day. They’re not normal. They’re outliers who got written about because they’re outliers. Most writers produce far less. That’s not a problem. That’s a fact.
What to do about it
You can’t delete the bias. It’s baked into how human cognition works, and no amount of willpower will switch it off. But you can deliberately build a more accurate sample.
Seek out writers who talk honestly about the slow, grinding parts. Catherine Ryan Hyde collected 122 rejections on her short stories before a single one was accepted, and she racked up more than 1,500 rejections total before Pay It Forward made her a bestseller. Malorie Blackman, now one of Britain’s most celebrated children’s authors, was rejected 82 times before her first book sold. Anne Lamott has written plainly about shitty first drafts for decades.
Talk to other writers. Not in the curated spaces where people post wins, but in real conversations where people admit what the work costs them. When you hear “me too” from enough writers you respect, the distortion starts to correct itself.
And keep a record of your own output. Not to judge it, but to see it accurately. Many writers are producing more than they think, and they can’t see it because they’re not measuring themselves.
The question worth asking
When you next feel behind, ask yourself: behind what? Name the specific writer or the specific standard you’re measuring yourself against. Then ask how you know that standard is real and not a vivid story your brain has latched onto.
Most of the time, you can’t answer. The standard turns out to be a feeling, not a fact. And feelings built on skewed samples are not a good reason to stop writing.
You’re not broken. You’re just comparing yourself to the wrong file.
Something I’m loving right now…
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My video podcast last week described how to cut words from a manuscript that’s too long. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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Have you ever fallen victim to availability bias? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. And congratulations to Steven Cooke, the winner of this month’s book prize, for a comment on my May 19/26 blog post about jootsing. (Please send me your email address, Steven.) If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by June 30/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
