jovanafung:

When you’re first starting out as a writer, you assume you have one good story inside you. Maybe 500 words? Maybe 2,000? 20,000 at most?

But then you start writing dozens of flash fics and short stories. You realize you have hundreds of stories in your brain.

Then, you write a novel. You write draft 1. Wow! Even if the quality is your worst work in years, you wrote 70,000? 80,000? 90,000 words? 

Then, you write the following drafts. The writing improves. You flesh it out. Maybe you added 20,000 words. 

You start wondering about publishing houses, query letters. You write query letters and actually send them. 

For a while, no one gets back to you. After some perseverance, and maybe more edits to your novel, you get an agent. You get a deal.

To think, you started off unsure of whether you would ever write 5,000 consecutive high-quality words.