You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
Something else can also be extracted from this quote; once you have the story to say the writing is easy, what’s hard is finding a story.
Writers sometimes spend months if not years trying to find the story which is the core soul of writing.
Once they find it, the words come by themselves, just as bees follow their queen and serve her.
The most typical example of this is screenwriting.
An average screenplay has 120 pages. The word count can vary from 7,500 to 20,000 words.
A writer can type 20,000 words in 10 days or less, but writing a screenplay in less than 18 months is considered a success.
A lot of time is dedicated to rewrites and polishing, but the majority of time is spent on finding the story.
With novel writing things get scaled up; the story is more complex and it requires far more words.