Kaui Hart Hemmings Quotes
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Setting shouldn't just consist of describing nature or a landscape, or of saying where something takes place. It is the world of specific people. It's not enough for it to feel vivid or credible; it should feel necessary.
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Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.
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I loved 'Belzhar' by Meg Wolitzer.
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The entire island knows our father, Fred Hemmings, Jr. - kids, adults, surfers, the governor, grocery clerks, gang members who call our house at night and threaten to kill us as soon as they get out of jail. Fred was a world-champion surfer and is now a well-known, controversial politician.
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I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.
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When you're a child, you crave formal recognition; you crave ceremony, celebration, certification of proof.
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I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that's what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.
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I'm proud of being from Hawaii, and I'm proud of being Hawaiian, but I'm more than that, too.
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Writing has never been like therapy for me, but blogging comes a little closer - I can smack-talk freely and frequently, and this is good for me.
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I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
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After college, I moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, and went snowboarding every day. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do. So I applied to grad school for writing, and I just gave it a shot and took it from there.
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Disney's Aulani Resort has really developed the southwest coast of Oahu and led to it getting more attention.
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What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow!
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It's useless to criticize things that people love and something that speaks to them.
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When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.
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I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.
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My seven-year-old daughter knows old songs and how the neighborhoods got their names. There are little things: Businesses receive blessings from Hawaiian priests before opening, and everyone's kids have their debut luau. You can't really get through a day without doing something Hawaiian.
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Two days a week, I go to my office at The Grotto, a writer's collective in San Francisco. I get there at 8:15 and write until around 1 or 2 P.M.
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The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.
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The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.
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I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.
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People go surfing before work and paddling afterward. My husband is from Wisconsin, and he goes to work in his Hawaiian shirt.
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I like to add props to render the specificities of place - paintings, food, clothing, signs, infrastructure, music, sayings and slang particular to the region and particular to the character. And props shouldn't just sit there; they should get used.
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Hawaii is so complex; there are so many points of view, and there are so many experiences to see and to find.