CARL HIAASEN: I'm pretty tough. I think most writers are pretty tough on themselves. And 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 asked 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 that I was reading that I would wished I had changed, or done better, or a piece of dialogue I wasn't happy-- 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 enough to know that whatever they've written, it could've 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 be absolute the most humbling experience in my life. I'd read that, and I'd think, I haven't even begun to learn about writing. 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 when you go after one of your own chapters is the words. And I keep a synonym finder and a thesaurus, and I keep a dictionary. A word jumps out at you, an adjective, a construction. Or in many cases, you find yourself, you've use 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. And 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. I remember in one book, a reader wrote to me one time and said, I just didn't know if you know, but you used this word. You used the word luminous like five times in the book. And he was right. I didn't even know I had done it. And five times out of 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. You feel that, oh no, I hope I'm not getting into a rut or routine or a pattern. But words are everything. And 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 your 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 on the computer, fix all the things I marked, and then probably do it two or three times again down the road. By the end of the time I have now, I usually have a box about this high from the ground, filled with the rough drafts and false starts, and chapters, and just old chapters going in. And that's not unusual. I don't know how other writers do it, but that's how I do it.