It's not that these things don't help creatives, but that they are not reliably sufficient to produce something of value. If I'm coding on an uninspired day, I

It's not that these things don't help creatives, but that they are not reliably sufficient to produce something of value. If I'm coding on an uninspired day, I can easily just shift to tasks that I know are simpler, and create a perfectly workable (if boring) solution. I can work my way through to finding even fairly subtle bugs just by stepping through the logic; it's slower than a flash of insight, but it works. A writer or other creative person with high standards must discard all of that uninspired work. In theory it may help keep the ideas churning, but for most writers I know it can be a frustrating grind when things just aren't quite clicking. It certainly helps to "train the muse" by writing every day at the same time, always filling the page (even with nonsense if that's all you can produce), and so on, but at the end of the day, they can't say "well, this is a shitty story, but it'll pay the bills". It won't. There's also the psychological difficulty that comes with putting sometimes years of work into something that may actually have no monetary value, or minimal. There are obvious parallels to building a startup, except that novels that succeed can't naturally be built into sustaining income -- you have to start another novel, and it can easily earn you nothing after 5 years of work.