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For something book-length, just don't do your re-read immediately. Don't Write chapter 1, re-read and update chapter 1, write chapter 2, re-read and update chapter 2, etc. Instead, write chapter 1,...
In addition to Lauren's list, here are a few things I do: Give each character a distinct background. Some possible elements to vary are geography, culture, ethnicity, education, age, friends, fa...
I think speech idiosyncrasies are a part of distinguishing characters from each other, but they are, more than anything, stylistic, writerly flourishes. Conan Doyle didn't define Sherlock Holmes's ...
If you want to write from a child's perspective, I suggest spending time with actual children. If you don't have any or aren't related to any, then you'll have to find some. You might try voluntee...
I think it largely depends on what kind of "children's book" we're talking about. If this is a book for teenagers (or even "tweenagers"), then it is an excellent way to convey a feeling of restles...
Actually, this is the only situation where run-on sentences should be used (and work better than short sentences). In ordinary situations they should be avoided like the plague, but if you really w...
Young narrators often think, and string their sentences together, paratactically -- short independent clauses joined by conjunctions: We went to the zoo and we saw a lion and then we saw a monkey ...
This is one of the many cases in which advice about writing is misstated. Long sentences are not bad. Convoluted sentences are bad. A sentence can be long without being convoluted. A sentence can b...
I am not a native speaker and I have trouble with long sentences. A long sentence is tiring to the eye and requires more concentration. Long is bad; you need to come up for air. Sometimes, a long...
Statements from many different characters each receive their own paragraph and an single individual will have their own single paragraph. However, if this is a story only to be seen by you then do ...
Why do you need to mark it up at all whilst you're writing it? To save time later? This is false economy. You should focus all your efforts on your writing, proof reading, editing etc. Then when yo...
Just because markup preferences are personal, I will mention the markup system I developed for writing my last non-fiction book. It is called SAM (Semantic Authoring Markdown). It is a general purp...
"Something happening" doesn't have to be earth-shaking. If the character wakes up, something "happened." It's been a long time since I read it, but in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, about...
Superpowers which aren't fueled by anything and have no consequence for using them. The example which springs to mind is "Heroes." When indestructible cheerleader Claire regenerated, or speedster ...
I'm afraid "infinite lists of items" are not really welcome here. OTOH, links to resources containing such lists are okay, so... Fridge Logic, Plot Hole Warning, TVTropes links.
Absolutely. I've read lots of books as research for writing stories, and I'm not even a compulsive researcher the way that some writers are. However, there's an obvious limit on how much effort yo...
Yes, research is worthwhile - to a point. This is difficult to answer because you're asking people to make a value judgment about how worthwhile research is. My opinion is that if your story is ba...
Maybe you shouldn't be writing. Maybe you should be collaborating. Sketch the thing out and hire a partner, or a ghostwriter. Short stories. Fewer words, and less need to create a world. You onl...
The best way to expand your vocabulary is to read a lot of books with unfamiliar words in them, experiencing them in context. However, there are ways to make this easier: Seeking out relatively m...
I've just written a story of around 7000 words that I set in 1611, in a monastery, so wanted to use the old English terms of the day, like 'ye, thou, thee, etc.' Gaining familiarity with these term...
I agree that the best way to improve your vocabulary is to read widely. But I also like subscribing to the OED Word of the Day email service. I save the off-beat words in a list, like kimet (fool...
I've been writing on the Mac for a number of years now. Over that time, I've settled into using Scrivener for project organization, version control, and major publishing; and Sublime Text 2 + Markd...
Give a try to IA Writer too. So simple, so beautiful. And with iCloud support you can use iDevices to continue your work where you left off.
You could try out Mellel: http://www.mellel.com/ Apparently it's good at RTL languages which you mentioned you will be using (Arabic, Urdu) and it's cheaper than MS Word etc. That having been sai...
Emacs is on the Mac. Just type "emacs" at the terminal. Emacs supports Unicode and bidirectional text (Arabic), etc. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/International.html#In...
