I took an an online class on "being your own best editor". It was very interesting and I wanted to try what I learned, so I headed back to a couple of old stories and have been reworking them.

Beyond the editing class, though, I ended up with a different approach to story construction than I'd tried before.

I'm working on a rewrite of Planetfall (original: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/19402864/). It needed, according to my oldest daughter, more explanation about the situation and the spaceships. So, I started adding it, but didn't like it: too much "tell" and not enough "show." I figured I could do a lot of the telling by showing in flashbacks woven in, but I know it could be a lot, and so it needs to be done in a way that doesn't feel so flashback-y.

That led to the idea of taking and writing a kind of vignette for each character that covers moments that will be used to lend flashbacks to the main story. The story has two main characters: Feran and Karmah. But something, I think, can be gained by treating the ship itself as a character, so the story construction is going like this:
1. rough draft the main story
2. write a "vignette" per character (Karmah, Feran, and The Romulus) of life moments that will be exposed in the main story
3. rewrite the main story as a "carrier" thread of the current day woven with the pieces from the vignette that expose the situation and character traits applicable to the main story thread.

I've done something similar on other stories to understand characters or places or whatever, but they were usually standalone stories of their own without the intention of including them in the main story. In this case, the main story is an event that is simple used to interweave the other stories of independent characters that occurred along the same timeline.

I'm sure there is a name for the technique or the result, and I know it isn't original and someone out there has a refinement of the approach. If you know, share!

Have a great, furry day!