The question really is what do you want to make, a VN, OK programming is not that big of a deal, you'll stand or fall on images, animations and writing. Perhaps a sandbox style game, or a management/trainer game, then programming is more important, and writing while still important can be done in stand alone chunks which could be less gruelling.
If you're set on ren'py good for you, low programming requirement and good for a VN, however this opens the question of visuals, DAZ is of course the favourite, something i've hobbied with for a while, it's not fast to learn how to do well but done to a high standard can look excellent, probably the best easily accessible animation+CG program available for a reasonable price to the public, at least that i know of, though you could go for the less versatile and in my opinion outright inferior Honey select which is, i'm told somewhat faster to use.
In short if you feel you need to tell the story, try writing it out in bullet point form as a list of events first, determine how you're story is structured, does it have natural breaks? if so a less linear style may work for you, does it have meaningful choices? if so would it work as a choose your own adventure style game? Is is flat out linear with emphasis on character interaction, dialogue heavy and first person, then your talking about a linear VN.
In short work out what you want to do, then consider this:
Linear story - may work best as a VN, then stick with Ren'py or twine, both handle this well, as for visuals i suggest DAZ, though this is a slow and hardware intensive process, perhaps try without images first time through, to get the hang of the whole thing and if your happy with everything else come back and put in images. This won't work with the patreon crowd, but will make you a better dev in the long run, Images deserve attention of thier own, also focusing too much on images and the game and plot would suffer, separate them, get good at both.
Choice heavy/Branching Story - A CYOA type game, twine and Ren'py both work for this, though twine may win out, similar advice to above, you're coding won't need to be much more than functional to make this work though more than for a near linear VN
Freeform or gameplay based - your going to need to seriously consider programming, perhaps a third party programmer if your desperate to get into the thick of it right away, to say picking this as a first timer with little experience would be hard work would be an understatement, good luck if you do, we need more game-play oriented games.
Now assuming you're set on Ren'py which i have a little experience debugging but not programming i'd suggest getting your head around a small amount of Python first, or even just general programming, variable types, strings, Boolean values, "if", "and", "else", "or" and other things that will let you add conditions to the game, basic maths in programming language and things like assignments, the difference between = and == for example. You could find a worse place to start than code academy, it's purely python not ren'py but it's a start.
As for Daz and that's a big if, there are plenty of tutorials around, i'd suggest, like always, looking over anything the Sickle Yield has done tutorial wise, Dreamlight(ValdemarB) is good too, but he's a little up himself and takes a long time to explain something simple(like me and this oversized post) while extolling how "impactful" it is, though you can't deny the mans results.
