Writing for young people isn't much of a stretch for Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen, known for his best-selling - usually hilarious - novels about murder and mayhem in Florida and for his love-hate relationship with Florida, has reinvented himself as a writer for young adults.

Hiaasen, who joined the Miami Herald as a reporter fresh out of college, brought his screwball sensibility to his first novel for young people, "Hoot," which won a Newbery Honor and will hit movie theaters next spring. Hiaasen grew up in suburban Fort Lauderdale, and he drew on his own guerrilla-warfare experiences trying to save small owls as he wrote "Hoot."

His latest novel, "Flush," features a wacky father, an astute set of siblings and a polluting casino boat. On a balmy fall day, he walked around Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo and discussed writing for young people:

Question: Why write books for young people?

Answer: An editor had come up with this idea, which I thought was insane - that I should try to write a book for kids, or what you would call the "Y.A. market," young adults, young readers. And I just thought it was nuts at first.

But you don't want to get on the same bicycle every day, and I thought it might be a nice change of pace. My stepson at the time was about 11, and he was just getting into reading and Harry Potter and that sort of thing, and then I had nieces and a nephew in that age bracket who had never been able to read any of my other books - for obvious reasons, I wouldn't want them anywhere near them.

I thought it would be nice to have a book I could give them that would have the same sort of wise-ass sensibility and the same sort of irreverence in the humor, which is really important to me - to make the books funny as well as tell a good story. At that time, obviously it was just going to be a break between my other novels. I thought the worst that could happen was I would have a book I could give the kids in my family. If it tanked, so what?

Q: Do you approach the writing of your young-adult novels differently?

A: I set it just the same as I do the adult novels - with some contemporary situation that is either stolen right out of the headlines, or either certainly some part of the consciousness of the area. You try to pick up something that is real. In Florida you usually get your best material just from watching the news and reading the papers.

Q: Did you read any Y.A. books to kind of think about how to ...

A: Before I wrote "Hoot" I read a couple - "Holes" (by Louis Sachar), "Tangerine" (by Edward Bloor), set in Florida. I didn't want to read too much. I just wanted to get a sense, not only for the range of subject matter, but also how adults in kids' novels can be.

I was very encouraged by reading those books, because basically I realized there really are no limits. You are not going to, or there would be no reason to, have an exceptional amount of violence or profanity. But in this story, when you are telling it through the eyes of this boy and he'll hear one of the grown-up characters say, "Damn," once in a while, or his grandpa says the word, "Hell," well, every kid in America has heard that.

But you are not going to hear the kind of vituperative exchange that you'd hear between a cop and a suspect in a police interrogation. An 11- or 12-year-old is not going to be in on that kind of conversation. As a writer it gets you off the hook. Every once in a while I'll hear, `Did you have to restrain yourself?' Not really, because the heroes and heroines of these novels are kids. And they wouldn't be in a situation to encounter that.

Q: How does writing for young people affect your fiction for adults?

A: I think it helps to some extent. In the new novel I am working on, there is a kid in the novel - a son of the heroine in the novel. She is divorced and lives in the same town with her ex-husband, and he goes back and forth between both parents. And he's as important of a character as the grown-up characters are.

Q: When you write for adults, and for children, do you have ideal audiences?

A: No, it is just purely instinctive. I don't even think about it. Once the characters are created and are on the stage and the story is starting to unfold, I don't have a conscious feeling of the audience at all. I have a feeling of logically where it ought to go and then just trying to sustain the same pace and primarily the humor.

All the novels I write, though, are character driven. They are obviously not painstakingly plotted in advance, as anyone who ever tried to outline one of them will tell you.

When I got out of college, the first promise I made myself was that I was never going to do another outline in my life. Because to me it felt like handcuffs. I don't want to know how the book is going to end before I start. I want characters to surprise me.

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.