Kaui Hart Hemmings Quotes
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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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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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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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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 love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.
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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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Disney's Aulani Resort has really developed the southwest coast of Oahu and led to it getting more attention.
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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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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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What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow!
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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.
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It's useless to criticize things that people love and something that speaks to them.
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The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.
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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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I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
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I can't speak for all Hawaiians, but the reality is that we depend on tourism. Locals might not want to go to the spots like Waikiki, but we do want tourists to experience more of the islands.
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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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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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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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The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.