Sometimes I loved the disruptive student in class who livened up lectures with wisecracks - it put a spin on things, added flavor, made me laugh. Other times, I wished the heckler would just shut up so I could learn something.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings
I wasn't creative enough to imagine my first novel becoming a film directed by Alexander Payne. Nor did I consider the possibility of seeing Hollywood stars moving through my personal version of Hanalei town: going to Tahiti Nui, rehearsing a scene in front of my cousin's cottages, driving the snaky roads.
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.
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.
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.
Jonathan Franzen seems like the grumpiest guy, and he doesn't seem to like much of anything, so I really don't care what he has to say.
When you're a child, you crave formal recognition; you crave ceremony, celebration, certification of proof.
The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.
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 like to work out every day, so that takes up some time.
I'm proud of being from Hawaii, and I'm proud of being Hawaiian, but I'm more than that, too.
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.
I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow!
I loved 'Belzhar' by Meg Wolitzer.
With families, no matter what kind you inherit, at some point you want to announce that you belong to it.
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.
Disney's Aulani Resort has really developed the southwest coast of Oahu and led to it getting more attention.
I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.
I always felt a little bit of an outsider, especially because I grew up on Oahu.
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.
One day during filming, George Clooney was wearing his surf shirt and board shorts, and my six-year-old daughter was in the background as an extra, playing in the sand - playing herself. She and Clooney suddenly looked equally Hawaiian, equally related to the place I call home.
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.
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.
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.
It's useless to criticize things that people love and something that speaks to them.
For my 11th birthday, I asked to be adopted.
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.
People go surfing before work and paddling afterward. My husband is from Wisconsin, and he goes to work in his Hawaiian shirt.
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.
Hawaii is so complex; there are so many points of view, and there are so many experiences to see and to find.
The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.
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.
