Words matter. These are the best Kaui Hart Hemmings Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
With families, no matter what kind you inherit, at some point you want to announce that you belong to it.
It’s useless to criticize things that people love and something that speaks to them.
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.
I felt like I haven’t had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
I always felt a little bit of an outsider, especially because I grew up on Oahu.
What’s great about teen fiction is that it’s all mixed up – there’s highbrow and lowbrow!
The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.
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.
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.
People go surfing before work and paddling afterward. My husband is from Wisconsin, and he goes to work in his Hawaiian shirt.
In putting setting to work, I like to think about long shots and close-ups. The long shot is the overall view of the place in which the characters live – the island, the town, the wide sweep of place. Then we narrow in. The close-up, the tight focus, makes the place different from anywhere else.
I’ve never gone back to the stacks after my book’s expiration at the front of the store. Not because I’m above it or anything, but I’d be mortified if someone caught me looking for my own book.
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.
Tragedy brings change, and that’s what I’m interested in most – how people plunge into change and try to fight, then eventually move with it with grace.
Nothing has changed that much, even during filmmaking for ‘The Descendants.’ I wrote. I took the kids to school. I cleaned the house. And I had dinner with George Clooney.
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.
I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you’re a child, you crave formal recognition; you crave ceremony, celebration, certification of proof.
I loved ‘Belzhar’ by Meg Wolitzer.
For my 11th birthday, I asked to be adopted.
The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can’t.
