Anne Lamott

I think I'm about to start a novel so I feel a sort of mounting dread because it's so much harder and it takes so much more stamina and time. It'll take me two years to write a novel. I'll take a whole year to write a really awful, awful first draft and the essays of course are immediate gratification, I can finish something in a week. I'll probably start mid-May and it'll go badly for a year. It's always the same. It'll be my 12th book, I don't sit down and go, "Wow, must be doing something right!" I sit down and go, "It's all over, it's all hopeless, it's a nightmare!" and little by little the characters will start to roll their eyes and start to contribute. But if you were to check back in a year I will be so relieved because I will have put together a really awful first draft and it will seem like a small miracle.
-Anne Lamott