Holding a Guitar Pick
Ways of holding a guitar pick (also called a plectrum) slightly vary from one musician to another. With some experience, you'll establish your own pick position that fits best with your individual preferences and playing style.
To begin with, place the pick between the thumb and the index finger of your right hand, as shown in the picture. (If you play a left-handed guitar, your picking hand will be your left hand).
As a starting point, hold the pick more or less perpendicular to the guitar body.
Now, angle it a little, as shown in the picture below. And You'll get a more aggressive, harsher sound when playing with distortion.
But most importantly, it will reduce the rubbing between the pick and the strings, lowering the chance of the pick getting caught up in them, and consequently making the picking a lot easier.
Some information about guitar picks and strings
There's a variety of different picks with various shapes, thicknesses and sizes. Some will fit you better than others. It's a good idea to keep a bunch of different picks around when you are at the beginning stage: hard, medium, soft, big, small... practice with each one for a while, and sooner or later you'll naturally find which plectrum is really for you.
The same thing goes for guitar strings.
Note that I don't mean to change the strings every half an hour just to check how they feel; it would be a real pain. You might experiment with a set of different strings when the time for restringing comes.
And while we're on this here, I'd recommend restringing your axe once in 1-2 months if you play a lot and still want to have a nice guitar tone. Practicing on older strings is also fine, they just will sound duller, and the thinnest strings will contribute some metallic vibrations to your tone.
If you feel that all the strings except the thinnest one(s) (most likely the higher E string) are OK, you can replace only this string(s) and postpone the full restringing process for a really long time.
Alright, enough talking. Let's get started with the picking already.