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Editor's Corner October 2009 Want to know what excites an RHCB editor? Tune in to the Editor’s Corner each month to get the inside scoop on a different editor’s latest and greatest project, from tomorrow’s bestseller to a literary masterpiece!
I love his books. I started reading him in college, burned through his backlist, and now wait for each new book with the rest of his deranged fans. When I needed a quick hit of that biting wit between books, I'd check out his column for the Miami Herald. I'd use him as a kind of litmus test to judge others. You like Hiaasen? You must be okay. You don't think he's the sickest, most hysterical satirist ever? Clearly there's something wrong with you . . .
So when he started writing for kids and I got to work with him I was thrilled - and petrified.
His prose is so smooth, so slipstream, that the reading is effortless. For me it's like the story is unfolding in my brain - it's how I would tell it if only I was a little smarter, a little funnier, and a little quicker with a line. So I resolved to really study his manuscripts - to see if I could figure out how that effortlessness was achieved.
Partly it's achieved with an amazing innate talent for storytelling. But it is also achieved with sweat. Carl sweats the details. He's incredibly hard on himself. He's always searching for a better word or a smoother wording. And he's hungry for criticism like no one else I know.
He wants me to pick his stories apart and challenge things - the timing, the motivation, the time of day, the devilish details. Does a panther really track mostly by sight and sound and not smell? (Yes, panthers have a terrible sense of smell, and they have extra smelly scat so they can keep track of each other). Wouldn't Twilly accompany the kids to the hospital in the helicopter? (No way! He'd avoid it at all costs. He's hardly the over-protective type.) Mom switches jobs part way through - prison guard or a restaurant owner? (Yeah, I was debating that for a while - she's a prison guard.) Do Duane and Mrs. Starch plan the second pencil chomp at the end? Would she do that? (No, it was Duane's idea - an impulse. I’ll make it clear.)
With Hoot, Carl was challenging himself to write for a new audience. He wanted something he could safely give to the younger kids in his family without scandalizing them. He had no expectation that anyone would like it. I told him I was pretty sure they would, but I know he didn't really believe me. But a Newbery Honor award and a long run on the Times bestseller list tended to support my position! And so with Flush he set himself a fresh challenge. He wanted to use a first-person narrator - something he doesn't often do, so it's a little out of his comfort-zone. That one worked out pretty well too.
With his new book, Scat, I can tell that Carl is feeling totally comfortable with his kid audience now. He's working with multiple plot strands and lots of whacked-out characters. It's more complex than Hoot or Flush, but he's trusting his young readers to keep up with him as he brings all the different story lines together into one hysterical whole. To me this book is quintessential Hiaasen. A professional snark, letting it rip.
One thing that really pleased me - Carl thought it would be fun to use a character from one of his adult books in Scat. Hiaasen fans know that he does this occasionally, and we all crack open a new book hoping for a glimpse of Skink - an ex Florida governor gone feral. He's one of Hiaasen's most iconic characters, and Carl did consider Skink for this story, but decided he was too dissolute for a kids' book at this point (he was in a bad way last I saw him. . .). But Twilly Spree really fit the bill. Carl first wrote about Twilly in Sick Puppy. Here’s how Carl describes him:
Twilly Spree had good intentions but a rotten temper, which occasionally got him into hot water. He didn't like high-rise buildings and freeways and ugly housing subdivisions named after non-existent otters or eagles. He didn't like concrete and asphalt, period, and he especially didn't like the people who were burying the wilderness under concrete and asphalt. And although he gave away thousands of dollars to conservation groups, Twilly Spree sometimes got personally involved in the causes in which he believed - too personally involved. One time Twilly witnessed a driver tossing hamburger wrappers from a car, and he followed the man a hundred and three miles down the Turnpike, all the way to Fort Lauderdale. That night, the litterbug was flabbergasted to find four tons of raw garbage on top of his red BMW convertible. Twilly, watching from the top of a pine tree, wasn’t the least bit ashamed of himself.
In Scat, Twilly finds a guy delivering pipes to an illegal oil drilling site. So he captures the guy, strips him naked, and glues him to a tree. As Carl puts it: "The fellow had not been harmed, but he'd been made to feel extremely unwelcome." Ha!
I read an interview with Carl that asked him why he wrote, and he basically said it was so he wouldn't have to kill someone. Like Twilly, he is deeply pissed off about pollution and corruption and the rampant greed that is paving over Florida. And in his novels he can make sure those responsible come to very nasty and very funny ends.
Kids get righteous indignation. And Hiaasen gets that kids often have a clearer sense of right and wrong than grown ups. They're a match made in heaven . . .
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