Carl Hiaasen, On Drafting and Revising His Novels

00:08 [Carl Hiaasen] I'm pretty tough. I think most writers are pretty tough on themselves. I don't know how many times I'll go through a chapter. I couldn't even begin to tell you how many times, but each time I'm going to change something. And to this day if you ask me to stand up and read before a group, and I was reading from "Stormy Weather," I can almost guarantee you I would find something in the section I was reading

00:30 that I would wish I had changed or done better, or a piece of dialogue I wasn't happy with. I mean, that's just the self-critical nature of it. And I'm highly, highly distrustful of writers who tell you, that's the best thing I've ever written. This is great, this is great, take a look. Most of the good writers I know are a little bit insecure but also realistic to know that whatever they've written it could have been better and that next time out they're going to make it better. And I can pick up any book in this room and probably read a page on it that would the

01:00 absolute most humbling experience of my life. I'd read that and I'd think, I haven't even begun to learn about writing yet. And as long as I can do that, then you go back and you work harder. The writers who are just happy with jumping through the same hoop over and over again -- and it's lucrative for some of them -- that's fine. I can't do it. I'd be bored silly writing the same book over and over again. That would make me crazy. Now the editing—I think the first thing you attack

01:30 when you go after one of your own chapters is the words. I keep a synonym finder and a thesaurus, and I keep a dictionary. A word jumps out at you, an adjective or a construction, or in many cases, you find yourself -- you've used the same -- let's say you've used the same verb on the same page. It may be four paragraphs apart, but it's still a verb that is a little unusual or something. To me, I immediately purge that off the page. I don't want to look like all of a sudden you've got a word in your head and you have to keep using it over and over again.

02:00 I remember in one book, a reader wrote to me one time and said, "I just didn't know if you know, but you use this word, you use the word ‘luminous' like five times in the book." And he was right. I didn't even know I had done it. I mean, five times out of a 120,000 odd words isn't too bad, but it's enough to make me wonder why am I—there's other words I can use that are just as good. And so now I probably never use the word because he got to me with that one letter, but that's the way writers are. I mean, you feel like, "Oh no, I hope I'm not getting into a

02:30 rut or a routine or a pattern." But words are everything, so when I've got that hard copy there I can make it like an editor or like a journalism professor or English professor would do when they're grading a paper, almost. You sit there with a pen and you start marking things you don't like, you do like, sections you want to move, scratching through things, ideas go in the margins. Then I'll go back in the computer, fix all the things I marked, and then probably do it two or three times again down the road.

03:00 By the end of the time I have a novel, I usually have a box about this high from the ground filled with the rough drafts and false starts and chapters and old chapters go in. And that's not unusual. I don't know how other writers do it, but that's how I do it.