Real writers don't "feel" their way through writing a story. They use the tools that are available.

I like to use a combination of the 3 act structure with a 12 step Hero's Journey (reverse engineering what works will help make make things that work):

From a blog post of mine a while back:

I've been working on a table of word counts for the various steps of The Hero's Journey across the standard 3 Act Structure.

The green rows show the word counts of the entire stories. (50,000/20,000/3,000/100/etc)

The yellow rows show the word counts per act per story. (25% of total for Act 1, 50% for Act 2, 25% for Act 3)

The first of each of the two columns under the Act word counts show the number of words for that step in The Hero’s Journey.
(5% of the total for each step of the Hero's Journey in Act 1, 12.5% for each step in Act 2, and 8.33% for each step in Act 3)
The second column shows the number of words you should have total when you finish that section.

These are only guidelines.
I hope it helps with your story writing.

Also posted here.

Here's a really great overview of the steps of the Hero's Journey.

I use those word counts as guidelines (with a little slop in either direction) which helps keep the stories feeling like they are hitting all the beats at the times the readers expect them, making them "feel more like real stories."