Carl Hiaasen, On Character and Writing from Observation

00:08 [Carl Hiaasen] As outlandish that some of the things are that happen in my novels, the spooky thing is that that stuff pretty much -- for the most part is based on things that have really happened here in South Florida, or things that were close enough that I could use that as a launch pad for the plot. So it's not all just rabid imagination. However, the characters are pretty close to either

00:30 certain people or amalgamations, combinations of people I've known. People, you know, voices -- you can -- I often get asked, where do your characters -- was this character modeled on so and so, or who was this character -- and it's seldom so simple that you meet somebody and you say, I'm going to put that guy in a book. It's seldom that simple. More likely, especially if you're a journalist, you interview somebody maybe for 45 minutes and it becomes 1 or 2 quotes in a newspaper story, and that's it. You file it away. But there might have been a lot more there, and you take that nugget of what he

01:00 did tell you, and you can in your own mind extrapolate and use your imagination to come up with a full-blown character just from that one little chance meeting that you had, or one little interview, and that's what you do. You use all the things, all the tools that you learned, at least as a journalist, that they teach you in English comp about using all your senses, your eyes, your nose, your ears, everything. You walk into a room, you drink it in. What does it smell like, what does it look like, who's there, what music's on the radio? All these details, which

01:30 they teach you when you become a reporter, are things to remember. When you walk to a homicide scene -- if this were a homicide scene, I'd be looking at the paintings on the wall. What kind of carpet is this? Is there somebody's drink on the desk, is there a phone off the hook? These are all the details that you absorb. Pretend that the homicide scene just exists in your head, and now you've got to create it in a novel in a fictitious form. You still need to bring all those things in, and it's the same way with characters.

02:00 How many times are you in a bar or a restaurant or a grocery store and you pick up a thread of conversation that's so intriguing that you wish you could sort of follow them around and see how is this going to -- how is this discussion going to -- what is he talking about? And the job of a novelist is to have that thread going through the whole course of a novel, so that people keep turning the pages because they want to know how is it going to end? That's an interesting person talking. He could be a criminal or he could be

02:30 a saint, but he's interesting and you want to care about him. I think you've done your job if you've created so-called protagonists who have a murky side to them, who are not -- whose values are strong but not cast in concrete. And I think you've done your job if you've created a villain who you can't decide what to do with him in the end. Do you throw him in prison? What do you do with him? I mean, I remember I wrote a novel called Skin Tight, in which there was a guy who had become a hit man.

03:00 His name was Chemo in the book, and he was a really kind of grotesque person physically, and that had a led to a lot of his problems in life, his appearance. And he wasn't an altogether nice person at all, but at the end of the novel I decided I didn't want -- I could have blown him up or had him shot or done a lot of things with him, but I didn't. He just got caught and off he was going to prison. And I got a letter from Dutch Leonard, Elmore Leonard, after he read the book, and he said,

03:30 "Chemo was my favorite character, and I'm so glad you didn't kill him off." And Chemo didn't do a nice thing the entire course of the book, but he was interesting enough that the readers had an investment in him by the end of the novel. And that's a tricky thing to pull off, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I felt good about, especially from someone like Leonard, getting that kind of letter.