I agree the curiosity of the successful about success is fairly universal, perhaps however there is more of an 'introspection' industry due to the democratisation of success - in other words, more people want to know why/how you were successful, and this in-turn can create a vicious cycle in which the creator/artist/achiever spends too much effort on the act of recreating something achieved before, and in turn producing a parody of their former work (I see Joseph Heller's post Catch-22 work as an example of this). The issue of 'writers block' wasn't so pressing in early modern society - Shakespeare had to write more successful plays to make a living, to that extent I think playwrights envisioned their careers as the art of learning a craft: Shakespeare could not be considered a creative 'genius' until a long time after, once the concept of an individual genius had taken root.