Tip #336: It's a small world

Don't ever make another writer's journey harder than it has to be.

http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/885.Matthew_Quick

How can you make another writer's journey easier?  This is what good feedback does.  This is what talking about your writing process and acknowledging it's personal to you can do.

Tip #335: Creating internal conflicts

pick a word that describes your character. For example: He’s compassionate. Then find another word that can also describe your character, but make it a polar opposite—terrorist... Giving a character a dual nature creates an instability, a lack of balance, that probably can’t stay forever.

http://www.davidfarland.com/writing_tips/?a=281

Tip #334: What is cultural appropriation?

Cultural appropriation takes place when a privileged group takes elements of an oppressed culture and uses them as it sees fit, without regard to their importance in the oppressed culture, often deforming them beyond recognition or distorting reality to the point of making the appropriated cultural practice take the place of the authentic one.

http://femmeguy.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/appropriation-of-femmes/

Tip #333: Inciting Incident vs First Turning Point

Your inciting incident... might have as few as one scene or as many as twenty—little snippets where your character discovers that he has a problem and that the problem... is life-altering

http://davidfarland.com/writing_tips/?a=273

Or has the potential to be life-altering.  In a good or bad way.

Tip #332: Making the world a bit more solid

Any... fiction writer, in attempting to present a fleshed out world, will probably several times need to reference something outside the actual story, some past kingdom or mythical animal, some hobby of the lower classes, some religious detail, or a line about, “That time when grandmother got into a drinking contest with a Giant Stoat…” ... making the world a bit more solid.

http://civilian-reader.blogspot.com/2013/05/guest-post-on-worldbuilding-by-lenora.html

Tip #331: Character tone

Each person that you meet has something of an emotional tone about them. Some people are stern most of the time, while others might be thoughtful, pleasant, or excited.

http://www.davidfarland.com/writing_tips/?a=271

Tip #330: What to leave out of a story

Try to leave out the part{s} that readers tend to skip.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/elmore-leonards-ten-rules-for-writing-fiction?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=buzzfeed

Tip #329: Using characters' desires to create character arcs

How far will that character go to fulfil their desires? Will he sacrifice the life of a member of his family to stay alive? Will she sacrifice her own life to kill him?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/crime-writing-competition/10159834/Telegraph-Harvill-Secker-Crime-Writing-Competition-masterclass-Stuart-Neville-on-plot.html

Quote taken from video so may not be word perfect.

Character arcs often build up to this question.  It's something we often grapple with daily: how far will we go to satisfy our desire for calorie-rich food?  Will we sacrifice our spare change/diet/figure/health/self-respect/love?  Where is the point when one desire battles with another and we start to question if the original driving desire is worth it?  Where is the point when we decide YES, it's worth it, or NO, it's not?  And what are the consequences of this decision?

The main character arc in Star Wars IV is different.  It's about Luke learning to believe in the Force (and therefore himself) culminating in his choice to trust it (and his own judgement) for a vitally important gamble (and foreshadowing the same decision in Star Wars VI).  But Han Solo has a desire character arc, discovering offscreen he can't abandon his friends in their attempt to destroy the Death Star -- even for money/long life.

Tip #328: The importance of structure

We know that if you experience the same thing over and over again, you get diminishing results. We have to constantly switch things up. That could be with story, characters, environment, or it could be with this "set-piece moment"

http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2013/07/the-last-of-us-with-neil-druckmann-part-two.html