Carl Hiaasen Visits Rollins College

â┚¬Å”Whether it's literary or not, it's my own damn story.â┚¬Â â┚¬â€œ Carl Hiaasen

My alma mater, Rollins College, has an inspiring event each year called Winter With the Writers. Four renowned writers conduct masterclasses, participate in a presentation with a reading and interview open to the public, and just generally create a buzz around campus. No matter the writing style â┚¬â€œ novelist, poet, journalist, etc. â┚¬â€œ the event is invariably interesting.

A classmate coaxed me to my first WWW. I rarely attended on-campus functions because, as a theatre major working full-time, I rarely had time for them, but Kathy caught me in an uncharacteristic moment of not being able to concoct a believable excuse and I tagged along. They've tried to disguise the auditorium in Bush Science Center â┚¬â€œ a window-free, bomb shelter of a building â┚¬â€œ but it is as much a lecture hall today as it was on that day. So you can imagine how unsuspecting I was to have a significant spiritual moment while listening to Kiowa-Cherokee Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday.

â┚¬Å”That's the first time I turned into a bear,â┚¬Â said Momaday during his speech. My breath went away as I instantly got tunnel-vision. Shapeshifting was completely foreign to me. As a concept it is hard to wrap your mind around, but I can tell you, with confidence, his statement remains the truest thing I've ever heard spoken.

See what I mean? Interesting.

Last Thursday, Carl Hiaasen was the featured writer, kicking off the 2012 edition of this festival of literary arts. Hiaasen is from Florida and, whether he is writing one of his popular novels or penning his Miami Herald column, he approaches his writing with a wicked sense of humor.  True to form, he kept the audience in stitches whether he was reading, teaching, or commenting.

He read the first chapter of his first book Tourist Season, but confessed an aversion to reading his stuff aloud. His reaction to his own words, he explained, vacillates between thinking a sentence he wrote was the most poorly constructed he'd ever seen, to feeling what he wrote was brilliant, bemoaning the fact that he no longer writes that well. In fact, he couldn't resist commenting on the chapter as he read it.

Hiaasen followed his reading by going through some real Florida new stories to demonstrate how difficult our crazy state makes his job as a satirist. A sex plane getting hi-jacked and an unlicensed plastic surgeon using injections of cement and fix-a-flat were among the items that made Hiaasen jealous he didn't think of them first.

â┚¬Å”When I'm writing these novels, I don't care about plausibility, because I'm in Florida.â┚¬Â

When asked about messages in his books, Hiaasen declared that he didn't approach his stories with a message in mind and asserted that such a practice would be â┚¬Å”deadlyâ┚¬Â for a writer. For all their humor, Hiaasen's books are flavored with messages â┚¬â€œ sometimes as liberally as Paula Deen uses butter, so I was a little thrown by the statement, at first. Activism gets into the stories because Hiaasen is passionate about the environment, and it's impossible to write without getting your self seeping into the mix. (A point he made himself in the course of the event.) Hoot is the most overt example as the story came from actual events in Hiaasen's childhood when he and friends actively (sadly unsuccessfully) tried to confuse construction workers to save owls.

My activist fix was nicely sated during the question and answer session when an audience member asked him about recovering Florida lost environment. Hiaasen launched into a calm rant about our elected officials in Tallahassee and assured the audience this current bunch is not there with our best interests in mind. His words elicited a rousing round of applause, which I found comforting in a crowd that I guessed had a high percentage of conservatives.

For the writers in my readership, I wanted to cover a few key things that Hiaasen said that might be helpful in your own scribbling:

Persistence & Volume. Hiaasen said he is far from the best writer he knows, but the difference has been that he has kept at it and that he did it often. A writer can have natural talent, but that alone won't make him a successful writer. In support of this, Hiaasen spoke of the book he is currently reading, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which speaks of a â┚¬Å”10,000 hours ruleâ┚¬Â â┚¬â€œ a theory that successful people have put 10,000 hours into their craft prior to success. (Incidentally, I found a quote from Momaday while researching this post that echoed Hiaasen's persistence advice.)

â┚¬Å”Writer's block doesn't exist.â┚¬Â This bit of advice comes from Hiaasen's years as a journalist. When your editor tells you to have 800 words on something by a certain time, your reply isn't that you need to wait for your muse or for the stars to align a certain way. You make it happen.

Revisions. Hiaasen sends his agent and one or two others his writing in clumps of chapters, rather than giving it to them as he goes along. This gives him the opportunity to have a solid hold on the story before hearing outside opinions. He estimates he goes through a chapter 30 times before sending it to anyone.

Outlines. Hiaasen doesn't use them. Basicaly, he feels that the outline will stifle the growth of the story. He quotes Elmore Leonard who once told an audience, â┚¬Å”Why would write them, if I knew how they were going to end?â┚¬Â

To learn more about Winter With the Writers, go here.