Like former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady Barbara Bush, I fell in love with the bizarre and twisted mysteries written by Carl Hiaasen.  For those who are not yet acquainted with Carl Hiaasen, he is noted for wacky plots centering around eco-terrorism in Florida. Some of the more infamous  characters in his novels are a blue-tongued vole that was actually a rat painted with a blue tongue and a Hooters waitress that was kidnapped for environmental reasons. As he is not the typical writer featured in the New York Times, I was excited to see that Carl Hiaasen was included in a New York Times Book Review series of articles called "Writers on Writing".

His article is MUST-READ for anyone interested in the art of stepping outside the boundaries of normal fiction. In the article, Carl Hiaasen discusses how he tries be different from the crowd. As an example, Hiaasen writes about a challenge the author faced when writing "Native Tongue"- specifically, he writes about how to kill off Pedro, the unruly security guard. Because Carl Hiaasen is not exactly a realist, he wanted kill off Pedro in an unusual fashion- the ordinary choices of a Mary Higgins Clark-type writer were not available to him and would have disappointed his faithful readers. To help him decide how to kill off the Pedro character, he turned to the current events of the times and changed them to suit his needs. (To avoid a Spoiler, I'll let you read "Native Tongue" yourself to see how Pedro was killed, but will give you  a hint: it involves an especially amorous dolphin.)

In his article, he stresses the importance of using current events as inspiration for both plot and details. Hiaasen does admit that because he lives in the great state of Florida, he has much more material than the average writer to choose from, but contends that competing with the original source material is not an easy task because Florida is so ripe with rich material.

I found it interesting to note that Carl Hiaasen started of his writing "career" as a satirist in high school because that is exactly what Stephen King did as well. Any aspiring young writers might just want to do the same.