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I've tried my hand at creating a crossword a few times, but generally there have been way too many interlinks between words for me to create even a solution grid with any ease. Often I get about a quarter of the way through a single 4x4 block, for example, when I realize that one of the words I'm about to create is total gibberish and I need to start over.
How do the professionals do it? What sort of tips and tricks are there to deciding which letters go into which boxes to form words?
While you can use software and premade corpuses (whatever the latin declination would be?), I think that's a bit of a cop out. The first creators had no such tools at their disposal!
The first thing to do is to forget about trying to get the black cells in a pattern. I find it easiest to just start with a good long word or three and go from there, slowly weaving — horizontal, vertical, horizontal ... so the corner gets filled. It requires some sudoku-style trial-and-error, maybe talking to yourself aloud (to get more possible matches: jud-e, jud-f, jud-g[em], etc.) and backtracking, but it is quite doable and rewarding.
The choice of the starting word will depend on the language and its crossword making rules. In Slovenian for example, most words have a roughly even distribution of vowels and consonants, plus you'll never find two of the first together. So I know I have to pick the initial word, so that it has at most two together, otherwise I'll usually have problems in the grid later and will either have to use more black cells to get the problematic parts out as 2/3-letter simpletons or resort to foreign words and names. English has less regularity, but you could start the same way.
If you can't get a 4x4 with what you've started with, try 5x3 or more in one of the favourable directions.
And if you still get stuck, going online for one word is still better than having most of the work done by a computer. There's always a 16th century Romanian poet, a Sudanese politician from 1922 or the wife of a Japanese olympian from 1984 to help you out.
Creating crosswords with easy to understand words can often be a challenge but there are many talented crossword constructors today. Many of these constructors use software to help them fill the grid such as:
Other than using these tools, it is also helpful to use short three or four letter words to fill in the grid around the longer words. These easy words are collectively known as "crosswordese".
