What I should have said was, I don’t know if there is much tendency for writers to improve over time. If you looked at a sample of 100 writers, you’d expect half of them to have done their best work in the second half of their careers if the distribution were random. To me, the random hypothesis seems closer to reality than the hypothesis that writers improve with time after they become successful.
OK, that I can believe. But I can also easily believe that some writers genuinely get better and some genuinely get worse. (I’m sure almost all get better at first, prior to their first successful publication, but that’s kinda separate.)
What I should have said was, I don’t know if there is much tendency for writers to improve over time. If you looked at a sample of 100 writers, you’d expect half of them to have done their best work in the second half of their careers if the distribution were random. To me, the random hypothesis seems closer to reality than the hypothesis that writers improve with time after they become successful.
OK, that I can believe. But I can also easily believe that some writers genuinely get better and some genuinely get worse. (I’m sure almost all get better at first, prior to their first successful publication, but that’s kinda separate.)