Q&A: Heather Buchta, Author of ‘Beyond The Break’

For fans of Sarah Dessen and Jenny Han, Beyond the Break is a funny and gorgeous debut about a girl experiencing her first love. Well, second, if you count her faith… and that’s where things may get complicated.

We’ve had the chance to chat with Heather Buchta, the author of the upcoming book Beyond the Break! She tells us all about herself- whether it be reading, writing, or what foods she wishes were their own food groups.

Hi Heather! Tell us a bit about yourself!

Me: I wish ice cream were a food group. I love dark chocolate, running, and Jesus, maybe not in that order, but maybe some days in that order. I love obstacle course racing (look up spartan.com ), snowboarding, indoor rock climbing, and playing soccer with friends. I like to pet every dog I see. I think all old men are darling, even the crotchety ones. I taught English in the inner city for 12 years. I’m not a fan of the guy on the airplane who took his shoes off. I’m currently obsessed with the show Yellowstone, but will only watch it with a glass of Basil Hayden’s whiskey. I love to laugh, and I’m always up for a good adventure.

What inspired you to write Beyond the Break?

I wish the idea was all mine! My awesome^10 agent Michael Bourret forwarded me an email from a friend of his —an amazing publisher, Francesco Sedita— who was looking for a somewhat wholesome YA standalone about “a Christian girl thinking about losing her virginity to her guy.” My agent told me to write for a few weeks, and then he’d send a few sample chapters. I thought best case scenario, Francesco would ask for more chapters. A month later, he called Michael and made an offer. That should have a lot of exclamation points. He made an offer after I had written only 40 pages!!! So exciting. But the deadline was nuts. Francesco Sedita (Penguin Project) bought it May 20, 2019. He and my other editor Nathaniel Tabachnik wanted the first draft by July 15, 2019. I needed to write it stupid fast. I had two months. Penguin Project wanted it on the shelves June 2020. Because of the short deadline, I had to set it in a place I was familiar—Manhattan Beach (I live three miles away). Therefore, world building would be easy: I knew the lay of the land. As for the story, I understood what Francesco wanted from this novel (Christian stuff and virginity stuff); however, I couldn’t write 300 pages of a girl going, “Should I?… Shouldn’t I?… Should I?… Shouldn’t I?” Yawn. So I needed to create an outward motivation: surfing. And I needed to wreck her world and make her outward and inward motivations completely frustrated. There’s more, but that’s how the foundation started.

If you only had 25 words or less to describe Beyond the Break, how would you describe it?

Eek! Brevity is hard. Wait, this doesn’t count towards the 25, right? Okay, 25, go: Being seventeen is hard. Loving Jesus is hard. Not surfing is hard. But adding a boyfriend to that? The sh!t just hit the fan.

Do you swim/surf yourself, or are you more of a sit-on-the-beach type person?

I’m definitely a movement girl. I love snorkeling and swimming in the ocean, but I’m a wimp in cold water. I’ll wear a 4:3 wetsuit even in the summer. I wouldn’t call myself a “surfer,” but I can paddle and stand in the baby breakers. I go out with my friend Vanessa locally, and mostly I cheer her on. Here and there I’ll pop up on some white water. I have a lot of friends who are great surfers, and that helped a ton as I was writing this novel. I found a high school surfing judge, Mark Cole, at the beach one day and bribed him with a drink and appetizers to teach me everything he knows.

Which character (or characters) did you enjoy writing the most?

Great question. When I write characters, I brainstorm about their personalities, their quirks, their hobbies. How are they similar to me? How are they way different? But then to really know them, I imagine how they react when they talk to different types of people. How would they talk to a stranger? A bully? An odd duck? A parent? What would they say to me if I approached them? What would we talk about? This helps create the roundness. Then I imagine how they’re going to change in my novel, and what’s going to be the catalyst for that change. When I write dialogue, I climb inside of them and pretend I’m them. I loved climbing into Lydia’s brain and feeling her spicy confidence. I loved climbing into Old Man Mike and then looking at Lovette through his eyes. Jake was harder to climb into, but I got to know him the more I did. My editors were constantly having me tamp Jake down, and I was like, “He’s not harsh!” Then I realized that I’ve had so many tough-as-nails coaches through the years, I was only pulling on my own experience. I thrive on harsh coaching. But Lovette was very different than me. And Jake wasn’t just her coach. He was a love interest. Anyway, thank God for editors. On the flip side, sometimes I’d write Jake with a little too much of the girly side of me. I loved bringing my Jake dialogue to my boyfriend because he would correct certain lines and say, “Yeah, a guy wouldn’t say it that way.” Lol.

My youth group experience was similar to that of the book, was that your experience too?

I didn’t go to youth group as a kid, but when I was in college and started volunteering at youth groups, yes, most definitely! When writing this novel, I spent a couple days brainstorming every moment, personality, and funny instance in my memory of youth groups. Once you get that on paper, only a teeny fraction fits in your story, but man, youth groups offer such great material! The thing about youth groups is that all are welcome. It’s eclectic and normal, popular and nerdy, wild and tame. You’ve got sweet people all the way to wackos. Sometimes the wackos are sweet, too. I mean, I remember a girl who talked in one giant run-on sentence for five minutes all about her friend named Taco. Brilliant. But there’s no place for her in BEYOND THE BREAK. Maybe a future novel will feature the taco-lover-run-on girl.

Did you plan the book, or did it come along naturally whilst writing?

Sometimes I’ll see a great scene in my head and write it out. The very first chapter I wrote of this novel was (a very rough version of) the last page of chapter 5 and all of chapter 6. Lydia was created that way. I spend a lot of time in my characters’ heads. It makes them easier to write when I throw them into a scene. As far as planning the book, I always have a loose outline. Outlines keep me from writing what I call “sexy sepulchre scenes” — scenes with brilliant dialogue and/or action that do NOTHING to push the story forward. Carcasses. I inevitably will have to cut them, and dang, it’s painful. To avoid that, I outline. Once your characters are developed, sometimes they’ll take you a little off course. But ultimately, if you keep your eyes as a writer on where you’re going, the story has a beautiful thread that runs from beginning to end.

What was your favourite and least favourite parts of the writing/publishing process and why?

Copyediting was fun. I never knew that sometimes writers have to add or take away words just for design reasons, such as having at least five lines on a page at the end of a chapter. Also, most writers would hate this, but I loved the cutthroat pacing of the deadlines. It felt like college again, when your final paper is due the next day, and it’s 11 PM, and you’re just starting. Only imagine 10 months of that. It’s brutal, but it also brought out some of my best work. I had no choice but to finish. Least favorite: cutting. I finished at 96k words. They asked me to drop it to 80k. That’s 60 pages of my novel — 60 pages of all nighters, meticulous word choices, and beautiful heart and dialogue — all on the cutting room floor. In the waste bin. And then puzzle-piecing my manuscript back together so it still makes sense. You learn really quickly not to be married to your work. In the end, my editors made the right choice. I cut it down to 85k, and it tightened up everything in the best way possible.

Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

Hmm…

• Similar reads: Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen; What To Say Next by Julie Buxbaum
• Book that changed me: Sold by Patricia McCormick
• Best first line of a book ever: Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
• Book I wanted to call in sick so I could keep reading: Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
• Favorite grown-up book: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• YA Book that has my heart: Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s the book I wish I’d come up with, but there’s no way I could pitch that and be taken seriously: “So there’s these horses. And they live in the ocean. No, not like seahorses. They’re like killer horses. Like, for real, horrific you-better-run-fast-Clydesdale-here-comes-something-bigger-eat-you-as-a-snack type of horse.” Lol. It’s beautiful, haunting, and romantic. It’s an underdog story. It’s full of brawn and athleticism. It’s a girl and her horse. It’s a rough-and-tumble guy with a kind soul. It’s tender. It’s bloody. It’s all the things.

Will you be picking up Beyond The Break? Tell us in the comments below!