When it came time for author, speaker, and artist Laurie Finkelstein to write her second novel, she approached her writing a bit differently than the first time around. When she wrote her first novel, Next Therapist Please, Finkelstein was a “pantser.” She didn’t plan out all the details beforehand and wrote by the seat of her pants. For her second novel, Dying to Play Mahjong, Finkelstein decided to take a more structured approach, and created an outline before writing that helped her plan character and plot arcs in advance. Something that remained the same when completing her second novel was that Finkelstein always took editing seriously. She highly recommends authors undergo big-picture developmental editing and use beta readers.