The first and most important thing you need to understand is writing takes practice.
Everyone starts out terrible at writing and each gets better only through practice. Your first story no matter how good it may seem to you is probably a steaming pile of dog turds. You don’t realize this now but years later, after you have written many, many things you will look back on it and go, ‘what a load of crap’. It may have great ideas and may be the seed for something amazing but technically and stylistically it will be crap. Practice makes perfect. Even Hemingway started out as someone nobody had ever heard of.
“When daylight comes the castle falls in ruins and O’Donahue returns to his grave,” Ernest Hemingway, Age 10 writing about a ghost that rebuilds an old castle every night only to be foiled each day.
Ok well maybe Hemingway was always Hemingway but even he got better through practice.
Very, very few people enjoy writing. Everyone finds it to be a chore.
There are basically two kinds of writers. One kind has to write for a job. This first kind could be for a magazine or online publication or novels but it is how they support themselves. They have to do it. The second kind of writer writes because they have no other choice. The words get clustered up in their heads and like autumn sap in a maple words begin to inexplicably flow out slowly but surely. Often writers are mixtures of type one and type two and they find ways to make money off the necessary chore of giving the words release.
The only way you will ever get a big writing project done is to sit yourself down and commit to writing on it regularly. Set a goal of X thousand words written per day. You will have to force yourself to go back to it again and again until it is done. You may need to seclude yourself from all other distractions to get it done. Then you have to force yourself to go back and rewrite it again and again until it is polished. Lastly you have to go back and make little tweaks and edits to punch up the quality. There are no shortcuts.
Good writers read! They read a lot!
You will need to read as much as you write. No that is not true, you will need to read far more than you write! You will read for inspiration. You will read for research. You will read for the simple pleasure of enjoying someone else's work. What you read will influence your work, as with all writers. Pick great things to read and learn from them.
Good writers borrow, but the truly great ones steal!
Don’t beat yourself down because your story reminds you of something else. There are no original stories. There is no story that doesn’t build on that which came before. Language is like an ocean and many ships sail the same ocean from many shores but they all do it in different ways.
Just look at the TV Tropes site. You can pick any trope and find dozens of examples of the same general plot playing out in various contexts. The key is not as much to make your story different but to make it something that is yours. You need to own your story and do it the way only you can do. It doesn’t have to be completely new to be a wonderful story told the way you feel the story should be.
Keep trying even when it gets hard and find peers to bounce ideas off of.
Look to most any famous writer and you will find they were part of writing groups and societies that predate their fame. Often they stayed in touch with these people long after their fame too. They sat down with other would be writers and talked about plots and devices and writing. They collaborated, critiqued and got laughed at. You need to embrace this. These friends (and frenemies) will help you improve and will help shape your writing.
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