I used to start with a scene or an idea and then write my stories (wait for it) word by word until the characters started to take on a life of their own, but the problem there is it takes way to long and most of the time waffled. For an experiment, I wrote a novel word by word, an hour or so each day. Nine months later I gave birth to a first draft of 300k words. I had it printed out and tucked away for a bit. I came back to it with fresh eyes about a year later. Some parts were good. Most parts were bad. Plot holes everywhere, but what did I expect? I didn't really plan anything.
I sat down and studied structure because writing word by word by the seat of my pants just wasn't enough. It would be nice to kinda know where I'm going. Robert McKee's "Story" is a great book if you want to know structure. He takes a very engineering approach to breaking down story and character. Yeah, it's for screenplays, but I think a lot can be gained from it for any type of storytelling. The only problem with structure for me is that I could plan it out to the nines and as soon as I write I'd be off course.
But, I found a decent middle ground. McKee talks about "research" and not just book research or ride alongs in police cars (if you were doing a crime novel), but researching your imagination too. I started to take inventory of ideas. I had an inkling for a story around this time and I began to take notes: what the characters looked liked, their personalities, not all at once, but as they flowed to me in-between all the other things I had to do (work, sleep, eat, etc) -- I did not start the novel. I would be walking outside, and I'd sit down and pull out my phone and tap the notes down as ideas connected in my mind. I organized them in a text file, then later Evernote. I wrote out scenes between characters as if I were writing short plays. I wrote their dialogue, thoughts, and actions -- any combination of them as it came to me. After a year i had accumulated a lot of material. I had a loose structure for a story that I could glue this material too and make up other stuff along the way. So I could have my story skeleton and I could have fun writing word by word because it wasn't just a blank canvas I was starting on. There were scribbles of the picture here and there that I could flesh out and connect them. By then, the characters voices were so loud in my head, in my sleep even, that the story demanded to be written, so I did it for NaNoWriMo and poured out 110,000 words.
For my comic on Tapastic I did something similar but in a faster cycle, and now that the comic is in production, I need to figure out the next story (as I draw the current one), but since I've been writing scenes and creating characters and living with them in my head, it should be faster to create rough drafts this time. Maybe.