I took a playwriting class in college. When I took the last act in for a reading, the professor and several of the other students told me the ending didn’t give potential actors enough to work with. I should kill someone, they said. So I did. Have you tried it?

50 Movies Where The Main Character Dies | TotalFilm

http://m.totalfilm.com/features/50-movies-where-the-main-character-dies/

My favorite English teacher in high school taught me several lessons that have stayed with me. One was, briefly, “Don’t start sentences with ‘the.'”
Another was, “Don’t use ‘very.’ It means nothing.”
Imagine my delight when I found this post.

http://writerswrite.co.za/45-ways-to-avoid-using-the-word-very

A quirky trait or two help characters stand out from the crowd. Perhaps an expression he or she always uses might do the trick, n’est pas?

15 Delightful Foreign Terms of Endearment English Should Adopt | Mental Floss

http://mentalfloss.com/article/55564/15-delightful-foreign-terms-endearment-english-should-adopt?bypass=1

I have loved Info Please since I discovered it in high school. Here are links to it and six other online sources for fast facts.

And this isn’t on the list, but it’s been my go-to grammar site for years: the Purdue Online Writing Lab — https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/.

7 Great Online Research Resources for Writers

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/7-great-online-research-resources-for-writers/

We sat, legs crossed, around a campfire on a summer night. Surrounded by woods and miles from home, we listened to a story of teens in a car on a country road. We could hear the gravel crunching under the tires as the couple  sped away from the terrifying vagabond. We screamed when we heard about the hook in the door handle.
Here are a few reminders about how to get your hook into your readers. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

The Common Elements of Good Storytelling

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/03/19/common-elements-good-storytelling/