Tampa Bay Times environmental writer Craig Pittman at work on Shell Key, near St. Petersburg, Fla. Covering the beat since 1998, he declares, “I’ve almost got the hang of it.”
Photo: Courtesy of Craig Pittman
Pittman: Both of those tragedies would have fit perfectly in the book because they’re the end result of things that I had already described. There’s a chapter on our obsession with guns, and that’s where the Pulse shooting would fit in. There’s another chapter that talks about the history of Disney, so that’s the logical place for that story of a sad event at the Happiest Place in the World. The thing is, so much news happens here that I could write a new book like this every year with all-new material. But as a writer, you have to stop somewhere, usually around the time the editor is screaming at you to turn in the manuscript already. SEJournal: How do you juggle covering your beat, making time for your family activities and writing books? And how differ- ent is it writing for a newspaper versus writing a book? Pittman: We’ve all got free time that we use up without real- izing it — watching TV, playing games and so forth. It’s like whit- tling. It may be restful but it’s not earning you a dime, either. When my paper froze salaries several years ago, I started putting that time to use freelancing stories for magazines, generally writing in the morning after the kids headed off to school and at night after they’d gone to bed.
Then the folks at the University Press of Florida expressed an interest in turning one of my newspaper projects into a book, and that led to a new way to supplement my main salary. I outline my book first, then outline the chapters, then set myself a schedule for knocking out each chapter one by one as if they were weekend sto- ries for the newspaper.
Any veteran journalist can write 17 or 18 weekenders over seven or eight months. That’s pretty much a book right there. When you set a schedule, it inspires you to make use of every bit of down time you get. My kids have been very active in Boy Scouts, and so I’ve taken a laptop along and gotten a lot of writing done on Boy Scout campouts and at summer camps when I wasn’t busy with the kids. The difference between writing for a newspaper and writing a book is that you have a lot more freedom in a book to stretch out, try new approaches, maybe be a little snarky or silly. Then when you go back to doing journalism, that experience makes you a better writer. You’ve got some more tools in your toolbox that you feel comfortable using. SEJournal: Miami’s bestselling journalist/author Carl Hiaasen calls the book “hilarious, creepy and sobering.” What’s next? An- other book in the making between non-stop daily environment re- porting?
Pittman: I have started fiddling around with the next book
idea. It’s one that’s back on the environmental beat. To me it’s sort of the ultimate Florida environmental story. But I’m not ready to talk about it yet.
Pittman is also author of “The Scent of Scandal: Greed, Be- trayal, and the World’s Most Beautiful Orchid” (2012), “Manatee Insanity: Inside the War over Florida’s Most Famous Endangered Species” (2010) and is co-author of “Paving Paradise: Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss” (2009).
17 SEJournal Fall 2016
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