Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explains Things to Me, has a few tips at LitHub for the aspiring, or just plain struggling, writer. Her advice is less aspirational and more hard-working than most. In short, don’t pretend it’s going to be easy:

It takes time. This means that you need to find that time. Don’t be too social. Live below your means and keep the means modest (people with trust funds and other cushions: I’m not talking to you, though money makes many, many things easy, and often, vocation and passion harder). You probably have to do something else for a living at the outset or all along, but don’t develop expensive habits or consuming hobbies. I knew a waitress once who thought fate was keeping her from her painting but taste was: if she’d given up always being the person who turned going out for a burrito into ordering the expensive wine at the bistro she would’ve had one more free day a week for art.

Remember the rule that Malcolm Gladwell popularized about needing 10,000 hours to master something? That’s what you’ll need to do for writing, at the very least.