I have one that I think helps - of course I made it up, so I'm biased.
Take a passage from a book you think is written well. For each sentence, ask yourself what, in your own terminology, the sentence is doing - what's the function of the sentence. For example, "a person reacts bodily" or "a decision is made involving time".
Then write your own passage for an entirely different story, wherein each sentence accomplishes the same function as what you encoded from the other passage.
For example, I did this to begin a children's story, taking my template from the first page of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.
THE READER by Bernhard Schlink
When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. As the old year darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't start to improve until the new year...
LULLABYE by P Aaron Mitchell
When the moon first appeared my little Zienna hid from it. The moon waited to see her for about 18 minutes, which is a long time for the moon. The moon felt for her with its beams but she just hummed to herself in the molasses jar. When the moon looked the other way she climbed out...
Maybe the relationship isn't obvious to anyone else, and that's okay. It's still good practice - you force yourself to tell your own story in a cadence that matches (at least to you) that of a strong writer.
To extend on this - this method is extremely useful at work.
When writing a doc, look for similar doc and not just copy their high level structure, but at the paragraph structure in the same way the parent poster has mentioned.
Take a passage from a book you think is written well. For each sentence, ask yourself what, in your own terminology, the sentence is doing - what's the function of the sentence. For example, "a person reacts bodily" or "a decision is made involving time".
Then write your own passage for an entirely different story, wherein each sentence accomplishes the same function as what you encoded from the other passage.
For example, I did this to begin a children's story, taking my template from the first page of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.
THE READER by Bernhard Schlink
When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. As the old year darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't start to improve until the new year...
LULLABYE by P Aaron Mitchell
When the moon first appeared my little Zienna hid from it. The moon waited to see her for about 18 minutes, which is a long time for the moon. The moon felt for her with its beams but she just hummed to herself in the molasses jar. When the moon looked the other way she climbed out...
Maybe the relationship isn't obvious to anyone else, and that's okay. It's still good practice - you force yourself to tell your own story in a cadence that matches (at least to you) that of a strong writer.