This metaphor has gone too far. Besides, everyone knows that the cake is a lie. (And does every conversation about writing need to devolve into “Is anything really original?”)
To return to the original topic, I second that I’ve never found writing books to be terribly useful; they may give you more tools to add to your arsenal, but usually the problem, at least for me, is not that I need more tricks, but that I’m having trouble with the application. In other words, specifics.
But it’s difficult to get, with IF, the sort of specific feedback I always solicit with written fiction. I would never consider a novel done if I hadn’t carefully proofread it and had someone (or, preferably, multiple someones) also proofread it and offer corrections, yet there’s no real way to do that with IF because of the difficulty of seeing the entire manuscript.
