Some amount of benign sarcasm follows

I think this depends on who you are.

If You are a Gift from the Writing Gods

Then you may be well endowed with a natural talent to write well on the first try without only extreme exception. If you do struggle, it's likely because you've chosen to or the gods have given you a quest, which will surely allow you to reach new heights in the writing pantheon. Whenever you hand your writing out to someone else, they immediately fall in love with it and gush. You inspire all of the best things in people with your writing and you're very charismatic. You have the connections, and where you don't have them, people generally like you anyways.

If your reality actually matches your perceptions of your abilities, then you don't need a back-up plan. In fact, you likely have been writing all your life. It's all you know how to do. And people already love you for it. Just keep doing it and doing it well. That's your plan.

That's probably not who you are if you're on this site as you likely are writing a story right now and wouldn't possibly have the time to read this.

If you have the ability to excel with focus & time, and want to write a book...

Then you must provide yourself the time and space to succeed. That means someone has to support your basic and frankly distracting human needs while you churn and work your words. If you are not in a position to feast upon in the beneficial grace and wealth of others, you may find you have to provide for yourself. Here you may find you have to make distinct and hard choices about what type of life you want to live. You only have 24 hours in a day. How much money can you make using that time while still sleeping, eating, socializing, and working. Probably not much, but with some hard choices perhaps you can sacrifice for a time until the writing becomes the thing you do.

This line of work is difficult. You may be popular today and unpopular tomorrow. Your space may become unpopular. You may lose a hand while wresting your two year old son out of an alligators mouth. The dangers are many and varied and unique to your situation, but they exist.

The person who chooses to be entirely safe will never be published, but the person who publishes without being safe may become a life lesson to other writers who want to make it past a young age.

If you do not find you have the ability to excel with much practice then you may just become a life lesson.

If you like to write, you don't need to be a novelist

The act of creation is wonderful, but books are perhaps the worst way to exercise it for a living. See helpful graphs elsewhere. That said, there are plenty of ways to express thoughts and opinions in the written form while making money. Some may be more to your taste than others, but they all tend to pay a living wage more regularly than writing novels. And you may have time outside of that normal job, to work on a novel in addition. Many writers feel the need to write and get paid and so they do all or some subset of the following:

Technical Writing - The form of writing which documents existing infrastructure. This is the how-to, the manual, and the pamphlet of documentation. The world would not work as well as it sometimes does without adequate documentation. Perhaps you have less freedom in this role, but if you're good at it, you can get paid and work a 9-5 in most places that have engineers.
Ad-Copy - Advertisements are, in general, written in some capacity. They scripts, short bursts of dialogue, etc. You get a bit of freedom, but it comes with deliverables/parameters. I don't know how this pays, but I assume it does given that advertisements are the life blood of most media companies. Maybe you travel more than with technical writing. Maybe you aren't quite as secure if the general tastes shift away from your specialties. Might suffer from old dog/new tricks syndrome.
Journalism - Almost all of the news gets written down at some stage. If you're good at relaying information of the non-technical sort (not that there isn't technical journalism) then maybe this is the role you want to take. Journalism has been shaken up a bit by the new media landscape, but so has almost every other writing job. You've got to like getting attention and holding it to do the job; and you may not be able to erect many work-life boundaries. You may also need to chase stories quickly and stick to hard and fast deadlines, which may not always allow you to write your best. Creativity is rewarded, but so is flim-flam. Money exists, but has some of the same super-star problems that novel writing has. The good news is that almost any one can be a journalist.

Other creative writing professions do exist, such as editing; which involve you helping others to write better. These jobs are essential and some people make better money at them and have a better life than the writers they support.

There are other non-novelist writing jobs. Many people who hold jobs must write and do not call themselves writers. A lawyer will write a brief, and boring as it may be, he is still a writer. I could not list them all. But, I think it is safe to say this:

Writing is hard, unless you're particularly lucky
Making money from writing is about as hard as anything else
A rise in creative freedom leads to a rise in responsibility and danger
There are lots of ways to be around writing that are more secure than being a novelist.
The world is changing. A new printing press has been invented. In ten years what we knew yesterday will seem a flimsy thing. But, in ten years you certainly won't have more than 24 hours in a day to live your life.

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