What makes your stool harder?

For several years I've had issues where I'll have little bits of blood on my tissues every once in a while (about once every week) when I wipe and it pulses a little bit for about an hour later (it also gets more uncomfortable by the time I hit the 8th wipe or so). When talking to a friend they told me it was ridiculous that I wipe 10-14 times. But I wipe b/c there is genuinely lots of literal crap covering the tissue still. It's like a paste almost. It's not liquid but I can't imagine it's normal either (the hardness of the stool). About once every 3 months my stool will be hard enough to where I just wipe twice and I'm done. So I'm thinking it's a stool hardening issue. The blood I think is coming from a fissure that I've made angry b/c I always wipe a billion times. Any ideas to help this? (Side note when I use prep. h it makes the blood go away for about a week).