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My advice would be to start out doing short stories. They have a couple of advantages.
First, they have a quicker turnaround. You can get a first draft done in a week or less. This means that you have more time on the back end to rework what you have into something that works. A lot of good writing that you see in books is actually rewritten, and often several times. If you have a story that’s ten to fifteen pages, you can easily rewrite the bad prose, or fix the plotting or see where the characters are doing weird things.
Second, the level of detail you need to get started is a bit less. You don’t have the space for a long detailed plot, or fifteen pages worth of world building information. You don’t have the space in the story to worry about what happened to your main character in the fifth grade and all the trauma it caused him. In all of that, you have time to hit the highlights and move on. This removes the temptation to follow Tolkien in the sense of spending large amounts of time building an entire universe and not writing the story.
Third, they’re easy to put out into the world. You can just put it on a blog, or a website. You can submit to short story contests, you can print them at kinkos and hand them out on street corners. Thus the need to worry about gatekeepers is less.
As far as characters, I personally use the type descriptions from personality tests (MBTI or Socionics or Enneagram) simply to get a sense of how the character might think. That helps me because if I don’t make a point of giving each character a different personality, they all end up sounding like me.
I’ll also recommend looking up the Brandon Sanderson lectures on either podcast or YouTube. He’s dealing with a more advanced level of writer, but it’s helpful. You can also find podcasts about the technical skills of writing like characters and descriptions and so on.
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