Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed.
This is how Randy Ingermanson begins his discussion on novel design in his article, How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method. I’ve found the snowflake method to be very effective, so I’ve decided to apply it to a story I started years and years and years ago, and every now and then write a little bit more to, or clean up what I have.
I received an e-mail from my old brother linking to a health story on the conservative news site, Newsmax.com, titled Dogs More Effective Than Prozac. The result? I wrote a story!
As a matter of improving my writing, I have taken to rewrite a scene to follow only one point of view. The idea here is to use a third-person perspective, with the point of view following multiple characters. While at it, I’ve also moved the scene from present tense (the tense I tend to write ideas in) to past tense (the tense I tend to write solid ideas in).