/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Read more, it expands not only your vocabulary but gives you a set of tools you can use later on.
Write more, just as any artistic outlet you only get better by practicing. Write a full chapter, shelve it for a week or so, then read it again when you have forgotten about it. Edit and edit again, no draft is final and being critical of your style and voice is essential. No author is perfect.
Get people to read it and comment on it. Friends, family, strangers on the internet. Take to heart good criticism and don't dismiss negative reviews because you can grow from them. But be ready to ignore the baseless "u r gay" ones, that's useless noise.

There are writing workshops online and author groups. Basically you read what others have attempted and they read yours in turn. Most know what they're doing and can give good pointers and you'll start seeing the little things that make a narrative pop.

One last thing, DO NOT write what you know. It's the worst piece of advice you could possibly get. It limits you and gives you excuses to not keep writing because you haven't experienced enough. Write about the things that clutter your imagination, explore what you can do with the power of making realities come to life in a reader's mind just with some black splotches on white.
"Write what you know" is not about yourself or events in your life. It's about emotions that everyone feels and you have felt, so you can put it down and let the reader fill the blanks with their own experiences. Love, jealousy, loss, melancholy, hope, all things that you have experienced about different things. Shift them and put them on paper so the reader can remember their own experiences and bring what you're writing to life and not just "MC went to point B" plotting.

And if you have something to show, them post it around. OC threads could use more prose.