The best way is to break the characters into their basic components. Each character has a reason to they are written in such a way. This is due to culture, tradition and history. Learn all the most common radicals (root words, like Greek or Latin words used in English) and get yourself well versed in the culture etc. Some examples, Chinese tradition and hence the writing is HIGHLY sexist. The male is important and the female is not. Using the female radical, 女... Combine it with a mouth becomes 如 to mean "if" since women's words are iffy! Combine it with a roof 安 means "peace" because she does all the housework and the man is at peace. Combine a roof with a pig to become 家 (family) Chinese love to eat pork; hence without economy (money), there will be no home to speak of. 人 when used as a radical becomes イ. Combine it with ニ(two) => 仁 benevolence which should be the basic relationship from one person to another. A man by the side of a tree means to rest => 休. 每 = man + mother = "every" since every man must have a mother in order to exist! 海 = ocean/sea since each and everyone must have water. 漠 = シ (water) and 莫 (no, none) = no water = desert. 無 = none, don't have. The top is a bundled sheaf of chaff. The bottom is fire. After harvest in autumn, the chaff are bundled and burnt. So nothing is left. 舞 = dance. The top part is the same. The bottom part represents to person as if one is "chasing" after another. Again this is a festivity in autumn after harvest is done. 秋 = autumn. The left radical is a stalk of rain. The right is fire. Which the chaff is burnt after harvest and that is in autumn. This is how I learnt my Chinese. I know the meaning even if I do not know its pronunciation. Chinese writing in my opinion is the easiest part of learning this language. It is semantic based and not sound based like alphabetical languages.

I personally prefer a mix of spaced repetition software (anki, skritter, or memrise), and lots of reading and writing practice. After you use a character enough times, it should stick. There's no way around spending s lot of time and effort, though. Learning the characters is a lot of work.

I'm sorry but I don't know there's any other effective way to remember Chinese characters. For us Chinese, writting them again and again is necessary for learning any foreign languages. When you know some rules of characters by writing for many times, it may be easier for you to learn new characters. Every part of a character has its own meanings. You can try to remember those meanings. good luck!

What Wayne13 has introduced is a very effective way to remember Chinese characters. I totally agree with him. There's another method I wanna recommend to you. Before you write a Chinese word totally correct, you need to feel the shape of the character（字形）. In other words, you need to regard this chinese character as a picture or symbol. The reason why Chinese people can read Chinese passages very fast is because the moment when they recognize the shape of Hanzi, they should already know the meaning of the words. As for youngsters like you and me, we seldom write words down now. Instead, we prefer using SNS like Wechat to text messages to friends. You just need two tools: pinyin and the shape of characters, then you will quickly find the word you want to type, and the online conversation will go smoothly. Memorizing 字形 is very useful before you want to remember acharacter thoroughly. I guess you don't want to suffer yourself at the first step to learn by rote , right?

This depends on what your goals are for learning Chinese. If you want to work in China, then yes, learning to write is important. If you only want to speak and if you are like most foreigners, you will never have any opportunities to write letters to anyone ... then focus just on recognition of the character ... That is an easier, less time consuming approach.