The voices in her head speak to Victoria Kneubuhl with reassuring regularity. From the mundane to the unexpected, they offer a measure of clarity in a world of disjointed images.

But Kneubuhl, considered by many to be the major Hawaiian playwright of our time, knows that sounds a bit crazy.

"It's terribly embarrassing, but my thought process is like a running narrative," Kneubuhl said. "I find myself doing things and kind of thinking in play dialogue or prose. I might be driving along and it might be raining, and instead of thinking, 'Oh it's raining,' I'm thinking: 'It was a rainy day and she was driving her car into Manoa Valley.' "

Don't call it schizophrenic. Call it the tool of a successful writer. The 57-year-old Kneubuhl has produced 12 plays and 10 TV documentary scripts since the mid-1980s. She is viewed as an inspiration by those in the literary community.

Her characters, often on stage for Kumu Kahua Theatre, have explored cultural clashes, Hawaiian history and women's issues. They spoke to Kneubuhl — whether she was behind the wheel or at her keyboard — and she gave them a venue.

"I don't know about other writers, but I bet they have that internal dialogue," she said. "That insistent, internal dialogue. When I'm writing a play and it's going well, I actually hear those people talking in my head loud and clear."

BUSY TIMES

This fall, though, the voices must compete with those of students, professors, actors and editors. Kneubuhl is busy.

She is serving as the distinguished writer in residence at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa English Department, teaching an undergraduate creative-writing class and a graduate class in play-writing. One of her plays, "Ola Na Iwi," which Kumu Kahua first staged in 1994, will be staged again in November.

And she's excited about her first novel — a murder mystery set in Honolulu in 1935. "Murder Casts a Shadow" will be published in fall 2008 by the University of Hawai'i Press.

"I love history, so I set it in the '30s," she said. "It's kind of a period in Hawai'i history that we don't hear a lot about. I like that time. The cars were great and the clothes were great."

WRITING FOR FUN

The mystery follows the adventures of two amateur detectives: A playwright named Ned Manusia and a newspaper reporter named Mina Beckwith.

Ned is involved with an effort to return three portraits of Hawaiian royalty from England to a Honolulu museum. When one of the portraits is stolen, Mina is sent to write a story. But she stumbles upon the body of the museum director, who has been clubbed to death.

"There are a few other bodies along the way," Kneubuhl said. "And there is a little romance. We'll just leave it at that."

Kneubuhl started working on the mystery three years ago, not long after taking a novel-writing workshop.

"I wanted to have fun," she said. "I've always liked the genre."

But it took longer and was more difficult than she anticipated, in part because she was also working on a book about her family.

And then one day in August 2006, Kneubuhl was in the Manoa Safeway, shopping for mayonnaise, when she bumped into the woman from the University of Hawai'i Press who had edited an anthology of her plays.

To Kneubuhl's surprise, the editor was interested in the mystery. Her book, which was only three-quarters finished, now had a deadline. Kneubuhl was finished by Christmas.

She wrote the book whenever she could carve out spare time, usually in the afternoons at her Maunalani Heights home, after working mornings as the director of educational programs for the Manoa Heritage Center.

"I know how hard it is to get published," she said. "It was serendipity. I feel super lucky that all I had to do was go looking for mayonnaise and I found a publisher."

To be asked to teach as the distinguished writer in residence was an honor she didn't expect.

The experience, so far, has been one of pleasant surprise. The students are better writers than she expected, and they're not as guarded about their work as Kneubuhl's adult contemporaries.

"It's fun to be around this kind of young, enthusiastic energy that's not as censored as us older people," she said.

But the hard part has yet to come. The day Kneubuhl has to grade a paper, she may just hear a voice from her own past.

"It's so hard to write a play, even a bad play," she said. "I remember the first play-writing class I took — I was the worst writer in the class. But I'm the only one from that class still writing. You never can tell."

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.