Best advice I've had is to just put it out there. I'd been writing here and there, but I was always afraid to even put something up, because 'what if I just dropped it, like i've done so much else in life'. I'd have been doing me a disservice, and goodness forbid anyone actually enjoys it by the time I inevitably fail to keep going!
But I did keep going. 2 days wrapped up in a cocoon after the first one dropped, afraid to even look at it... but then I found myself wanting to write the next one, even though it scared me. Years I've wasted coming in and out of the same stuff, and never hitting post... rather: I've written hundreds of pages only to delete (near-all) of them, only few snippets were saved from my hateful delete key by my husband.
So for me, may not be true for you, or anyone else... what I needed was to put something up I couldn't pretend away and trash in the darkness. Now I want to write even on days when I really shouldn't (like today, eyes aren't too well considering the lack of sleep I got, but I'll still probably put up 500-1500 words by the end of the day, despite myself)!
Tolkien is more of an exception. He more or less PIONEERED fantasy. The revolutionary thing he did was flesh out a believable world packed full of lore to discover even outside the boundaries of his exposition. He's a good world crafter, not so much as a storyteller. That isn't to say LOTR and The Hobbit weren't good books (I quite enjoy them and go back to em' every once in a whole), but for the time being, he's more of a figure to learn from than to admire.
Well, the pioneer of the 'epic fantasy' brand of modern fantasy, and he popularized the term '
fantasy' (as opposed to 'fairy tales', 'gothic horror', 'fantastical', and others). Guy set the stage for
success with fantasy, particularly in his marriage of magic and fantastical beings, both of which are in *usually separate* abundance in the stories below.... with the added advantage of 'an epic quest' styled similarly to the Iliad (or the Odyssey, if the abject suffering inherent in LotR can be factored in, I know I love it... >__>)
But the fantastical itself has been rather well developed with excellent works... Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, A Christmas Carol (my first love in reading), Carmilla (my spiritual goddess) and Dracula, Frankenstein, Undine and The Little Mermaid, The Portrait of Dorian Gray (a personal favorite), to say nothing of fun little pieces of fantasy folklore of Arthurian ilk, or which came out of Arabia before Islam... put rather a stop to it.
The 'real' pioneer of the
fantastical is Horace Walpole, and I'll not hear otherwise! :D Tolkien brought us 3 pages on just how dark the black darkness was, but ol' Horace Walpole brought me all the lovely terrors that fantasy is capable of bringing to bear!