Fuck it here's a wall of actual practical writing advice, from a person who's been writing professionally for most of their adult life:
1. If you want to effectively communicate with your writing, people need to be able to understand your words. This means that sometimes you have to sacrifice your flowery, punctuation-filled sentences for phrases that are more straightforward. "I don't care if people have to read this fifteen times! I'm an artist!" is a lovely sentiment that will kill your work in most contexts.
2. If you're chugging along and reach a point where you're totally blanking and can't think of the next sentence, the problem is usually with the preceding sentence. Rewrite that sentence, and see if it clears the blockage and allows you to keep going.
3. There are going to be times where you simply hit a wall and cannot get your brain to cooperate on a piece. If that happens, do whatever non-writing tasks will help you on the piece later. Do some research, take some notes, start an outline, or even just format the page appropriately. Just do something, do not let yourself use writer's block as a cop out.
4. Learn how to take criticism. Grow a thick skin. Negative criticism, even the really rude kind, is still information about how your writing is being received. You don't have to heed all (or any) of it, but you need to respect its value as a piece of information. Decide what to do with it based on how you want your work to be received.
5. Grammatical perfection and clarity do not always go hand in hand. The importance of grammar will depend heavily on the context of your work, but clarity usually comes first.
6. This is hard to teach or explain in a bullet point, but if you want to do this professionally, you will get further if you can effortlessly switch your natural writing voice to match someone else's. Most writing jobs are not in creative fiction, and publishing opportunities will be limited if you can't match a brand voice. Practice looking at examples of copy and creating new copy in the same voice. Ideally, no one will be able to tell which were yours.
7. Do not stare at the blank page. If all that comes to mind is stupid and useless, write it down anyway. Just don't sit there, letting yourself get intimidated. Open that blank doc and immediately start puking up anything you can.
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