Complex non-perfect characters vs perfect stereotypes

I'm chipping away at the long list of blog topics people asked me to write about, and this is one that I'm afraid to write about, as I don't think I have written enough to chime in on it. But when I voiced my doubt, my readers shouted at me that, yes, I can, I've written great characters. Well then, you guys know better, I suppose, as we writers are always too hard on ourselves. Let me spill here what I think, and you tell me what you think or if this was helpful to you. Deal?

Stereotypes are familiar yet forgettable. It's easy to use a stereotypical character as a crutch. Everyone loves a certain type of a character and is familiar with it. We all have grown up with them, both in life and in fiction. Heroes. Villains. Father figures. Mother figures. These are the big ones. There are also the typical sulky teenager, the dull librarian, the sexy chick, the nerdy boy or the macho guy. See, this is why I was afraid to write this, as I'm not 100% familiar with American-specific stereotypes in fiction, sort of am translating in my head right now. Anyway. Back to the point. You can plan out your novel with great character types and gloriously set out to writing it. Here is the problem, though. Unless you know what it's like being one of those stereotypes, you will most likely fail. Number one, readers will feel the characters are fake and flat, and they'll be bored because they have read books with characters like that over and over again. Result: they will likely forget your character as soon as they're done with the book. Number two, you will get bored yourself writing it, because you get satisfaction from writing something you know, something that rings true to you, something that you've been carrying inside and are dying to share. And if you're bored writing it, your reader will be bored reading it. Unless you've lived a lot of life and know how to spice up a stereotypical character with flaws and imperfections, I would steer clear of it. Which leads me to the next point.

Non-perfect characters are hard to write yet unforgettable. Why exactly are they hard to write? Because usually they're very close to who you are as a writer. The best stuff you write is always based on your deepest truest self. If you've been through a lot of shit and a lot of life and a lot of love and joy and grief and every possible emotion there is, you will be capable of showing this array of emotions in your characters. We're all non-perfect. That's why we relate best to imperfection. Even the most glorious hero must have a fear of darkness or secretly carry a blanket from his childhood to soothe himself in the moments of dire need. Even the most powerful mother figure must have weaknesses in order for us to believe in her, to believe she is real, she can exist in this world. Because we're building a fake world in our novels in such a way so as to make people think it's real. That's what carries them away, what makes them forget their daily struggles and disappear into a good story. And it's these flaws in the characters that we remember most. Take Humbert Humbert from LOLITA. Can you be any more flawed than that? And what about Scarlett O'Hara? Or Peter Pan? Or Harry Potter? They all have huge flaws, and we love them for it.

Write from people you know. There is this thing that somebody said and everybody always repeats everywhere, write what you know. I think it applies here. Don't worry about your characters being stereotypical or not stereotypical, perfect of imperfect, or whatever. Write what you feel, what you know, what you've seen and experienced. Write characters that ring true to you, no matter how crazy they might seem to others, or even to you. Deep in your gut you know that people like this exist. For example, I'm a little scared to start writing IRKADURA because I have seen so many weird strange personalities in my life, growing up in Soviet Union, that when I tell stories to my American friends, they always raise eyebrows, or exclaim, Wow, there are really people like that? You're not making this up? And I'm like, Nope, I'm not making this up, it's real. But see, it's because I know it's real, because I feel it's real when writing it, whoever will read it will feel that those people are real, not just fictional characters, and that's my goal as a writer, to make you believe in my stories. Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention. Somebody asked me recently how I write characters of the opposite gender and if I have any tips on that. Well, that's my tip. Write from people you know, it will always ring true.

Can I stress one more point here, the one that I've been stressing many times and you're probably sick of hearing? Well, hate me all you want, but I will repeat it once more. Please, please, PLEASE, don't worry about characters being written properly, or your novel structure being correct, or the length of your chapters, or any of that smart shit. Forget it. JUST WRITE. Just write your story the way you would tell it to a friend, or to whomever you want to tell it. As long as you stay true to storytelling, as in, every sentence should push it forward, like this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened, you'll do fine. The more you write, the better you will feel all these smart things people like to talk about, character types and novel types and genres and structures and whatever else. The lesson I learned, you can read as much about writing as you want, it will not teach you how to write. Only writing will teach you how to write. Even my blog - I keep writing it, attempting to answer your questions, but my main goal is to hold your hand, to make you feel like it's okay to just write, despite the fact that you're scared and think you don't know how to do it. I'm scared too, I don't know how to do it too, but I'm still doing it. Do it with me. Let's keep writing.

On novel structure

First, let me apologize for this blog post being late. I have successfully moved to the Moon, but have lost a bit of time to a black hole, it seems. Am I forgiven? Yes? Excellent. Let us proceed with the curious topic of novel structure. I got this question from a reader in the email:

"I'm writing my first novel, and it's based on a true story that I experienced, but of course it is fiction so I can tell it better. I'm struggling with the structure. At first I thought I could form it as letters/emails to one of the other characters, written by the protagonist. Yet, that only lasted a page before it turned into "journal entries" by the main character. It still feels off as I write. Do you have any suggestions?"

I haven't written over 30 novels to be able to claim that I'm a novel structure expert, alas, am only writing my 4th, ROSEHEAD. However, I do have some ideas about it. For what they're worth, here is what I go by.  

Every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is so simple, yet in the frenzy of daily writing so easy to forget. Some people call this a three act structure, others call it something else. The point is to create a world for the reader to be able to plunge in, sail through, and get out with a sense of something major being accomplished. Think of it this way. Remember the story that you heard recently that grabbed you. It can be anything, even a news article, like, this morning a mutant raccoon ate Mrs. Shlaugbauer in her own backyard. Wow. You want to know more, right You're like, what the fuck, mutant raccoon? I hooked you. In a sense, that's the first act, or the beginning. Something happens. In this sense, it doesn't matter how you write it, be it in the form of the main characters's diary or journal entry, like in THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER by Stephen Chbosky. What matters is, what happened? Why would the reader want to keep reading? This initial event is the beginning of any story, be it a teenage conversation ("OMG, did you hear about Johnny getting wasted yesterday?") or a fantasy series beginning ("The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."). Both examples introduce a character we're curious about, either because we know him (Johnny), or because we want to know him (the gunslinger). The entire beginning is the expanded setup on this idea, to let us know where we are, what happened, who are the main players in the story, and so on. Once we get comfortable, BAM! Something drastic happens, and the meat of the story begins, where we know who is doing what and what they want out of it. The end is essentially the characters getting something they wanted, or not. Hence comes the payoff for us. It's why we read books. In life we rarely get a chance for things to resolve to any satisfaction, things are in the air, even the end of our lives is in the air, because we still don't know for sure what happens after we die. That's why the ending has to be clear, for us to have that awesome resolution feeling.

Clear story structure comes not from writing, but from rewriting. All first drafts are piles of mumbo-jumbo higgledy-piggledy stream of consciousness that can be simply called SHIT. The goal is not to obsess over structure, the goal is to dump it all out on the page, to start seeing any structure at all. So it's okay if you feel your writing has no structure. Keep writing until you've got it all out, until you feel like your story has come to an end and there is nothing else you can add. You might start out with the idea of wanting to write a novel, and it might end up a short story or a novella. It's okay. It's better to write a good novella than a poor novel. Size doesn't matter, story does. After you write it and have a chance to sit down and read the whole thing from beginning to end, you will start seeing patterns. Stephen King said something along the lines of, you're unearthing a skeleton buried in the ground, you start seeing bones, and a skull, and you keep cleaning the debris away until the whole thing is out. I would suggest a radical approach, something I did with SIREN SUICIDES, not because I knew how to do structure, but precisely because I didn't know how to do structure. I simply wrote and rewrote and rewrote until I started seeing order emerge. In the end, I think I might have overwritten it (did 5 drafts), but I learned a lot, and with ROSEHEAD I'm only doing 3 drafts. It's a feeling you get, and the more you write, the clearer it becomes. So don't worry about novel structure, just write. It will come.

Read a lot, to find books that will teach you structure. I don't mean reading books about writing. Forget those. Uh-oh. Did I just dare say this? Oh no, I know what's coming. Dear esteemed fellow writers who have written books on how to write books, please don't take this as an insult. It's not. It's simply my way of dealing with my own insecurities as a writer. I'll explain. The only book on the craft of writing I like is Stephen King's ON WRITING. Why? Because it didn't down talk to me. Stevie simply shared his life and his findings on how to write books. Most books about writing I read make me feel like an idiot. I get depressed, thinking, great, there is so much about writing I don't know, why the fuck would I even try writing? Forget it. It makes me depressed. So I blatantly ignore them. I AM SURE THERE ARE A TON OF AWESOME ONES OUT THERE. It's just that, every time I get depressed, I lose writing time (it usually kicks me out of my normal creative state for about a week). What does help me, and I think will help you, is reading a lot of novels. And I mean, A LOT. I try to read a novel a week. The thing is, the more you read, the more structure you will see in novels. You will pick it up on some gut level, that feeling that you know what the writer is doing. The problem is, we're all different, our senses are attuned differently, so it might take you a while to find your types of books, your types of authors, whose books talk to you. Just keep reading.

After all of this being said, my only two rules are, to write for at least 4 hours a day and to read for at least 2 hours a day. I don't think about structure or character development or any of those other fancy terms, I concentrate on getting the story out, hoping that one day I'll learn all there is to learn, and stubbornly moving forward no matter what.

5 rules to writing a novel in a month, or how to conquer NaNoWriMo

I 've never done NaNoWriMo, so I don't know if I qualify to write this blog post, BUT I BADLY WANT TO, ONE YEAR, WHEN I HAVE TIME! So, here are my qualifications for this post, before you start throwing rotten tomatoes at me. I typically write my first drafts in 6 weeks (8 weeks if I'm really taking my sweet time), so I suppose with the whole idea of writing a book in a month, I can totally dish on how to make it work in 4 weeks, because 6 weeks is, after all, ALMOST 6 weeks, right? Right. Here we go then. First of all, before I dive any deeper, I must warn you. My methods are pretty radical and not for the fainthearted. As in, my childhood has been far from happy, and I've learned to have a thick skin and an ability to make myself do things when I don't want to. If you're not the kind that likes to squeeze creativity out of yourself by any means possible, then I suggest you go watch butterflies somewhere else. Here we'll be talking glorious sweat, blood, and guts. What, still here? Alrighty then. 

Rule number one. For the month of November forget about any social outings or events or coffee dates or your uncle's birthday party. Like, seriously, take out your calendar and clear everything out. You will need, of course, to keep going to work, if you have a day job, but everything else goes. Next, go to the store and buy yourself food that can sustain you for a month, namely: lots of protein, veggies, fruit, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. You're only permitted chocolate in terms of sweets, everything else must go. Sugar, processed foods, all tend to make you sleepy and stupid, and you can't have that while writing. Also, forget alcohol. Don't shake your head at me, I told you that my approach is radical. By the way, I'm describing my daily writing life here for you, it's what I do on a daily basis, while writing, all year long. Next, you need to tell everyone what you're about to do, because you're apt to get a lot of pissed off friends banging on your door, wondering what the hell has happened to you. Tell them, for the month of November, you're unreachable, period.

Rule number two. Okay, now that the basics are out of the way, you will have to decide what you're going to write about. Using my methods, it's very easy, except that not everyone likes my methods, as they are unconventional. Here is what I do. I dig deep inside and think of the most painful moment in my life, or one of the most painful moments, something I haven't told anyone, or told only a few select people. I look for something that doesn't let me sleep at night, that bothers me on a very deep level, and I start there (because writing is the best therapy there is). I just start spilling that pain in the very first sentence, and usually the first sentence is the summary of your novel, so there goes your planning. You don't need to do it, you know what your whole book is about. Don't believe me? Here, I'll illustrate. My trilogy SIREN SUICIDES starts with: "I chose to die in the bathroom because it's the only room in the house that I can lock." My YA novel ROSEHEAD (still in progress) starts with: "Lilith Bloom had a peculiar feeling that once she stepped into the rose garden,  it wouldn't let her out alive." And my literary novel IRKADURA (starting to write in December) starts with: "Irka stopped talking the moment she learned how to talk." If I can do it, you can do it. So do it.

Rule number three. Write, don't edit. This is a must, and if you happen to break this, I will find out where you live, come over, and chase you with a broom. Seriously. A great many books never get finished because writers get stuck in the constant editing. The goal is to throw the story on paper, the WHOLE story. You can worry about editing later, in the 2nd draft, but first you have to know what to edit. I will mention here what Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, has said: "First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.” See? Your whole job with NaNoWriMo is to write the story. Essentially, to write the first draft. I heard once about some famous writer who wrote 1st draft on a dare in 10 days, or something crazy like that. But that famous writer had already a ton of novels under his belt. Do you? I didn't think so. Neither do I. That's why we shall assume that it will take us a whole month to do 1st draft only.

Rule number four. Don't forget to read. You MUST include reading time into your daily NaNoWriMo writing routine. Literally, think of it as writing. It's part of writing. If you don't read, you can't write, might as well not even try. My formula is, I read half the time I spend writing. At least half the time. If I can, I read longer. Meaning, if I wrote for 4 hours, I try to read for at least 2 hours. Ideally, you can squeeze at least 4 hours of total work every day, meaning, you should block out about 3 hours for writing and about 1.5 hours for reading or so. If you can't write at least for 3 hours a day, I don't know if you can hit the goal of finishing the novel, unless it's only 50,000 words. My 1st drafts are typically about 120,000 words. If you divide it by 6 weeks it takes me to write them (and I write for about 4 hours a day), then it turns to 20,000 words a week, which will yield 80,000 words in 4 weeks, a pretty sizable 1st draft. Therefore, depending on your speed, you can absolutely do it within 4 weeks and 3 hours of daily writing. Oh, I forgot to mention, I write only on work days and take weekends off, so if you write on weekends during NaNoWriMo too, you can totally do it.

Rule number five. Have fun! We often forget why we write in the first place. We write because writing makes us happy. If at any moment you feel like you're blocked, stand up, stretch, look out the window, drink a cup of coffee, then sit down and write down the first thing that comes to mind, even if it seems unrelated to the story. The point here is - to have fun, to be goofy and completely unpredictable, to keep enjoying yourself. There is a reason why you do NaNoWriMo, isn't it? You were super excited when you decided to do it, didn't you? Well then, keep that excitement going! 

I'm out of rules here. And I pulled them out of thin air, anyway. I'm not participating this year in NaNoWriMo, I'm sorta doing my own NaNoWriMo, starting on 3rd draft of ROSEHEAD on Monday the 4th, so I will be racing along you. Happy writing!

Word count, or how long should your novel be?

Per your request, I will attempt to shed wisdom on something which I'm still discovering for myself, namely, how long should a novel be? How many words? I don't have a specific number I'm adhering to in my novels, rather, a certain feeling I have gathered from reading books, primarily traditionally published. I would imagine this topic is more of a pressing issue for self-publishing authors as we have no team of professionals to rely on, somebody who can tell us how long our novels should be, depending on the genre, on the type of novel, etc. I'll share with you my story, my numbers, and my feelings on it, and hopefully it will be helpful. Maybe it will even make me realize things I haven't realized before. 

A typical novel is about 80K-100K words long. This is literally the only piece of information I have gathered from writing groups, from other writers who told me about it, and such. This is a very broad number that includes adult novels in all genres, from literary to sci-fi to fantasy to westerns to even memoirs (for the purpose of this blog, though, I'm only covering fiction books). In this range, 80K-90K words is considered to be a more typical length, lower than 80K on the short side, and higher than 100K on the long side, with over 120K words considered too long. From what I heard about YA novels, the number hovers around 60K-80K words, and middle grade books even lower, 20K-50K words. This is not my domain, however, I'm only sharing with you what I heard and read about online. Now, from my personal experience of reading, I have read books that are total exceptions to this rule, for example, Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel (and one of my favorite books) Fight Club is only 50K words, and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, another one of my favorite books, is 3 books in 1, and about 230K words long (I haven't been able to find the exact word count, calculated it from 925 pages multiplied by typical 250 words per page). Then there is Neil Gaiman's new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a rather slim book at only 192 pages, which would make it about 48K words (haven't read it yet, but thinking maybe Neil got to the point of being able to say more with less?). To look at my own stuff, the total word count for Siren Suicides is 245K words, with book 1 at 78K words, book 2 at 75K, and book 3 at 92K. I can keep going here with other examples, from Harry Potter to A Game of Thrones to everything else under the sun. This leads me to the next point.

You novel should be as long as it takes to tell your story. After having written only 3 books (well, 1 that split into 3), and writing my 4th one, I firmly believe in this. Throw all rules out of the window. Precisely because you are self-publishing, you can do whatever you want. Your story will tell you when it's complete. If it's only 10K words, well, it was never meant to be a novel. So finish it, publish it as a novelette, and move on. You might still make it into a novel. For example, Hugh Howey, the awesome rising self-publishing star, self-published the first installment to his Wool story as a novelette at only 12K words. He then wrote 4 more novelettes, in the same world, added them and published all 5 together as one book, Wool, at 528 pages, so about 130K words.  It really comes down to the story. If I may be so bold, I would suggest you to stop thinking about word count altogether and start thinking ONLY about your story. A great short story is better than a long drawn out novel that nobody wants to read. On my own example, I'm learning the lesson of saying more with less. I think I have overwritten Siren Suicides by doing 5 drafts. People who beta read 4th draft told me that although it was confusing, it was raw and charged, and after I have attempted to make it sleek and clean, I ended up expanding it to the point of being too long. I'm thinking about maybe coming back to it later and editing it down to one book, and republishing. We shall see how it does. But I can tell you that while writing it I didn't really worry much about word count. I wrote it for therapy, and it ended up being as long as it ended up being. 

Listen to your readers, they will tell you how long they want it. This is something that is maybe applicable only to those people who employ a similar process of writing as me. I'm basically sharing my entire writing process and crowd source feedback, by making all of my drafts available for download on my site and sending them to everyone who wants to read them and give me feedback. In general, if the majority of people tell me something is too long, than it is too long. If they tell me it's too short, than it is too short. I believe in this sense, the more you write, the better you get to feel your own length of your novels. There is a certain rhythm, a certain tempo to your words, and it's what makes you YOU. If you try to be someone else, your readers will sense the lie and ditch you pretty quickly. So don't be afraid if you are a bit on the longer side. So what? It's you, stay you, please. Same goes for short. I would say, write as many flash fiction pieces or short stories as you need to write, to finally write a novel. Your story will tell you when it wants to be longer and become one. Strangely enough, I have never written any short stories, launching into novel writing right away, and I tend to be on the long side. Maybe it's me, maybe I need to write a lot. Only future will tell.

There. I hope this was helpful. I think the biggest takeaway from this is just to keep writing. Our stories will decide themselves how long they want to be.

What to edit in first draft, or how to write second draft

This was a hot topic when I asked on Twitter what people wanted me to blog about next, and since I'm in the process of editing 1st draft of ROSEHEAD (or, in other words, writing 2nd draft), it fit perfectly. Plus, of course, people saw me blasting a picture of my board with sticky notes and were wondering what's written on them (gibberish, mostly, I tell you, and maybe some nuggets of sense here and there). Anyway... here you are, sitting, all happy with yourself for having finished 1st draft of your novel. Woohoo! You drank the wine, you ate the chocolate, your friends patted you on the back, you took the required (Stephen King says you should, and I believe him) 2 to 4 week break, occupying your genius self with other things, and now the day has come. You opened your 1st draft, you poured yourself a fresh cup of coffee (okay, okay, for some people it's tea), and now you stare at the screen, wondering what in the blazes you ought to do with it. Well, here is what I do with my 1st drafts. Take it for what it is, it's only my second time doing it, or... maybe fourth, if you count SIREN SUICIDES as three books.

Read the entire draft in one sitting, if possible. This is very important. Along with the fact that you should take a break (read Stephen King's ON WRITING, if you don't believe me)  between drafts, before you do any writing, you have to get a sense of the overall story, and for that you have to cram it into your head in the shortest amount of time possible. Here are my numbers. It takes me about 6-8 weeks to write 1st draft (roughly 80-100K words), it takes me about 6-8 hours to read it. I turn everything off, so I have no distractions, and read it without editing. Do not be tempted to edit! Once you start, you will get sucked into it, and it will slow you down. Just read the damn thing, and take notes. That is what you see on those sticky notes in the picture. I have a pad of sticky notes and every time I stumble on something, have a question or an idea, I jot down the page number, maybe a chapter number, and one line about what bothered. For example, I discovered that I mention 30 people in the Bloom manor at dinner on one page, and on another I say 21. That's a continuity issue, so I wrote it down. Or, a character pulls out a bird feather from the pocket, without me previously having stated how that feather got into her pocket. I go like this until I'm done reading the entire thing.

Your opening sentence is your novel; your opening paragraphs set tone for your chapters. I take special care about editing the very 1st sentence of the 1st chapter, as well as the whole paragraph. I try to summarize the entire novel in that 1st sentence. In 2nd draft of ROSEHEAD I edited it to this: "Lilith Bloom had a peculiar feeling that once she steps into the rose garden, it won’t let her out alive." To compare, here is the 1st draft version: "The garden reeked of rotten sweetness as if the roses were not blooming, but rather decomposing in the heat." You see the problem here? It doesn't state who the main character is, nor what her issue is. We are left with some garden that stinks. Who cares? It's my general rule now to mention the name of the main character and the problem she or he is facing in the opening line. In SIREN SUICIDES it's: "I chose to die in the bathroom because it's the only room in the house I can lock." It's written in 1st person, so I don't mention the name right away, but I squeeze it into the 1st paragraph nonetheless, which I try to make as a setup for the entire chapter. My favorite 1st line is from Stephen King's GUNSLINGER: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." If you read the entire Dark Tower series, you will know that it pretty much summarizes everything. In that 1 sentence. Amazing, right? Well, that's what you need to do too. For example, IRKADURA is my next novel, and I already have the opening line. It might change later, but it sets the tone: "Irka stopped talking the moment she learned how to talk." 

Get rid of over-explanations, repetitions, and excessive descriptions. My personal weakness is describing things extensively, so this is what I do next. You might have something different, but all rookie writers seem to have the problem of obvious repetitions or over-descriptions, for example: "She bent her legs and sat down on the couch by the ornate glass window." I do this a lot, to those of you laughing right now. Let's peel this apart. Do you know anyone who can sit down on the couch without bending legs? No? Exactly. You're overstating the obvious. Let's see how this will look. "She sat down on the couch by the ornate glass window." All right, can you sit up on the couch? No. There is only one direction, down, so this word is redundant. Also, is a window typically made of glass? Yes, unless it's some special window. Let's cut that too. Here is what we have: "She sat on the couch by the ornate window." Bam. Much cleaner, right? (By the way, as a non-native speaker, I still stumble on the use of the, please don't kill me if I used it wrong here.) Your 1st draft will be probably littered with sentences like this one, I know mine is. It's okay, that's what 2nd draft is for, to clean it up. In essence, you write a lot in your 1st draft and you cut a lot out in the 2nd.  

Clean up the dialogue so it flows with the story. I have this problem of creating disconnected pockets of dialogue that make sense when I write them, but when I read the whole thing later, seem to be disjointed, because in reality a lot of time has passed between the instances when I wrote them, but when I read the whole draft, I perceive them very close to each other, and sometimes they make absolutely no sense in the fabric of the story in terms of its flow. For example, if two characters had an argument and 10 pages later they talk nicely to each other, you have to at least hint at what made them forget their disagreements, or edit and make them angry. Also, if your dialogue is very lengthy or clean or self-explanatory, in the 2nd draft break it up, make it sound more human. Cut sentences short, insert silences, unspoken words, things like "umm..." or "look..." or "listen...". Best, read your dialogue aloud in front of the mirror so you can your facial expressions, and where you see a puzzled face, you have to edit it. 

Get rid of continuity issues. I'm borrowing a screenwriting term here, since I used to write screenplays. I suppose the same applies to novels. These problems are very simple. I already mentioned above how on one page I mentioned the number or guests as 30, and on another as 21. That's a continuity issue. If at the beginning of the chapter your character wears a blue polka-dot sweater, and at the end a purple striped sweater, that's a continuity issue. There are many more, like character's names and their correct spelling, places, specific terms, etc. Basically, the facts of your novel. 

Indulge in research and fill in specific details. And, at last, instead of cutting, cutting, cutting, there is one thing that I do here which constitutes adding. While I write 1st draft by the seat of my pants, flying through it and not giving much thought to research at all, in the 2nd draft I take my time to go and look up all those things I'm talking about, to add just enough facts that will make my story sound authentic. For example, for ROSEHEAD I had to research the types of roses, the methods of growing and fertilizing them, the terms rosarians typically use and more stuff like that. This is the fun part, but be careful not to be carried away into spending hours and hours on this. Your story is the most important thing here. If you have a weak story, no amount of research will make it stronger. 

Let's see... I think I covered all major things I do. No, I lied, I didn't. There is one big component that I forgot to talk about. Your novel's ending. That's because in SIREN SUICIDES I didn't know how it would end until draft 4, and in ROSEHEAD I knew how it would end in draft 1, so it doesn't apply to draft 2. I suppose you might know how it ends by the end of draft 1, or you might not. Don't focus on it, keep editing. The ending will come. There. I think this is it. Anything I missed? Please, chime in.