Tip #250: The long & short of it

theoretically I knew that chapters don’t all have to be about the same length.  Eric {Flint} made it real to me... Five hundred word scenes became chapters.  A single telegram became a chapter... I discovered this was a technique that would make a particular scene or elements in that scene stand out and be more memorable than they would have been had they been buried in longer chapters.

http://www.fictorians.com/2012/05/28/anatomy-of-a-collaboration/
The same technique can be used with paragraphs or sentences.

Tip #229: Not so fast

Which of these two sentences is... stronger...?

He peered through the window and spotted a pile of bloody towels on the floor.
OR

He peered through the window and spotted a pile of towels on the floor. One of them was smeared with something dark, and in a heartbeat he knew what it was.

Blood.

http://romanceuniversity.org/2012/03/29/keep-them-turning-the-pages-by-laura-griffin/

Tip #216: Historical language

Glamour in Glass is set in 1815 and I wanted to have the language fairly clean of anachronisms. The challenge came in trying to figure out what words didn’t exist yet. So I decided to create a Jane Austen word list, from the complete works of Jane Austen, and use that as my spellcheck dictionary.

http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/words-i-couldnt-use-in-glamour-in-glass/