Writing is not just one thing. It is many steps. Repeated. Improved. Repeated again.

Fantasy author Anne Bishop said as much when asked how she became a writer:

It depends on how you define the word. I became a writer the first time I cobbled together a character or two with the wobbly bits of a plot and wrote them down in a notebook—and then did it again. And again. And again. I wrote lots of short stories, some good, some awful. I read books about the nuts and bolts of putting a story together. I read articles about plots and characters and how to make them believable. I wrote until my stories began to be accepted in small magazines where payment was a copy of that issue of the publication, and then semi-professional magazines that paid enough that I could buy a pizza to celebrate the sale…

No, the money from those first sales will not be much. But yes, the pizza you buy with that money does taste better.