1. When in doubt, make it worse. Not sure if you should kill the best friend or if the first day of school should be terrible? Do it! 
2. Incorporate tension on every page. If everything is perfect, it’s boring. Even low-grade tension is enough (like having characters bickering).
3. Build mystery. If you reveal everything immediately, it will be 1) boring exposition and 2) doesn’t give a reason for your reader to continue on. Mystery prompts curiosity. 
4. Cut out the boring stuff. Does your character need to brush their teeth? Probably. Do we need to read about it? Unless the toothpaste has been poisoned, no.
5. Alternate between high-intensity and low-intensity scenes. After a heart-pounding action scene, your reader will need to catch their breath. Or, if it’s slow scene after slow scene, they may loose interest.
6. Make the goal hard. Either the goal is physically difficult to obtain or it forces the protagonist to face an inner flaw (ideally, it should be both.)
7. Follow a plot template to get started. ‘Hero’s Journey’ or ‘Three-Act Structure’ are good places to start.

How do you strengthen your plot?

Unlike a movie, writers can’t simply hit ‘record’ and show the grimy hotel or the overgrown forest: we have to describe the setting to our readers as if they were blind. It sometimes feels like you have to stop the story to explain what things look like. Boring. 

But description can be a powerful tool to reveal more about your character.

I used to write my stories out-of-order. I had an outline of my book, so I’d write whatever scene I felt like that day, anything from the opening to the climax. But it caused problems. 'Your pacing is all over the place' an editor told me. I spent hours re-writing scenes to get them to actually fit into the story. Subplots popped up randomly, looking more like a fabric scraps than a ribbon woven into the story.
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I now avoid writing out-of-order for these four reasons:

Writer’s block. That frustrating event when you can’t figure out what to write next. But what should we do about it? Here's five approaches to help you get unstuck.

As a Christian writer, I strongly believe that all stories we write need to reflect the Christian faith in some form. I’m going to share with you my philosophy when adding faith to my speculative stories.