Tip-Top Writing Tips

My main piece of advice: Try to write every day. It's what I do, and I think it's made it a lot easier to write when I need to. If I don't have any ideas, I'll just write a silly story about whatever pops into my head, not even particularly caring about the quality.

One thing I like to do is keep an eye out for details. Little things that have made their way into the story that can have interesting consequences beyond wherever they were introduced. Sometimes you work in two minor plot points just because they were convenient at the time, and then you realize you can do something great just by putting both of them together.

Raise the stakes! This is particularly relevant to Grand Battles, but it's useful in general. Stories are always about some sort of conflict, and a stagnant conflict ultimately gets boring to follow. You don't necessarily have to make the conflict grow in scope, or get worse; revealing new aspects to the conflict, such as how another character is affected by it, can also raise the stakes.

Of course, there's got to be a balance. If you focus entirely on raising the stakes, you may forget to actually have your characters accomplish anything in the process. Resolving a conflict, even a relatively minor one, is like ending a story; and one of the main reasons we follow stories is to see how they end. If your story's long enough, why only give us an ending once? Give us a bunch of little resolutions along the way. They can still advance the larger story, but every smaller resolution, if done well, makes the overall plot that much more memorable.