How to Breathe Underwater by Vicky Skinner
Published by: Swoon Reads
Publication date: August 14th 2018
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult
Kate’s father has been pressuring her to be perfect for her whole life, pushing her to be the best swimmer she can be. But when Kate finds her dad cheating on her mom, Kate’s perfect world comes crashing down, and Kate is forced to leave home and the swim team she’s been a part of her whole life.
Now in a new home, new school, and faced with the prospect of starting over, Kate isn’t so sure that swimming is what she wants anymore. But when she decides to quit, her whole world seems to fall apart. But when Kate gets to know Michael, the cute boy that lives across the hall, she starts to think that starting over might not be so bad. There’s only one problem: Michael has a girlfriend.
As the pressures of love, family, and success press down on her, can Kate keep her head above water?
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What Inspired Me to Write HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER
Hi, everyone! I hope you’re having an absolutely excellent day because I have arrived to be your Debbie Downer!
I love hearing about what inspires a particular story. Half the time, there’s a real-life event that catapulted a writer into the midst of a great novel, and I love to hear those stories. To me, the real-life inspiration of a story is almost as important as the story itself.
So, I’d love to share with you the inspiration for my book, How to Breathe Underwater. First, I should say, when I wrote this book, it looked nothing like the book that sits on the shelf at Barnes and Noble today. When I first wrote it, it was a story about a girl who sees her best friend almost drown in the ocean and so decides to never set foot in the water again.
The story today goes like this, Kate is a champion swimmer, but when she catches her father, who is also her lifelong swim coach, cheating on her mom, she’s suddenly uprooted and relocated to a town where she has to start over: new school, new friends, new team, new life. Only, she isn’t so sure she wants to swim anymore, and she’s falling hard for the boy across the hall.
I wrote the first draft of the book in 2010, a year after what I’ve dubbed “the worst summer of my life.” When I graduated high school, I had my whole life planned out. I was going to school in Colorado, where I would live for the rest of my life, writing novels. Only, two weeks before classes started, an unforeseen problem kept me from going to Colorado, and instead, I ended up living with my parents and going to the nearest community college in Texas. That story has a very happy ending, but at the time, it was the worst, and I was convinced that I was being punished. You see, I was a violinist in high school, and when I graduated, I decided to quit, which meant no music scholarships and no music programs and a lot of disappointment from everyone in my family.
Lucky for me, when I fell into one of the deepest depressions of my life, a good friend of mine showed up on my doorstep and refused to leave until I felt better. She took care of me. She made sure I ate, she spent the night so I wouldn’t be alone, she forced me to watch the entire Avatar: The Last Airbender series (which was awesome!). And shortly after, I had to scrape myself off the couch for my sister’s wedding, which proved to be the beginning of the end of that particular episode.
Almost a year later, I met my husband, and everything started to make sense. Everything in my life seemed to fall into place, and I realized that I had gone through something pretty awful so that I could get to something amazing.
But that awful thing still happened, and it still affects me to this day, so I wrote about it. I wrote about meeting my husband; I wrote about having my life upended by a parent; I even wrote about a toxic relationship I had with an authority figure in high school that I didn’t realize I wasn’t over until I had already signed the contract for this book.
So the moral of the story is, put your pain to paper. For me, emotions don’t die. They just get moved around until I have a chance to write about them. So even though that summer and that crap from high school felt like it had gone away, it hadn’t, and it reared its ugly head when I most needed it to.
So when you look at Kate, know that I, too, went through a big change that made my life fall apart, but just like Kate, I survived (spoiler!).
Author Bio
Born and raised in Texas, I don’t act like much of a Texan. I like cold weather and hate country music. I have a gorgeous husband, two dogs, and a Literature degree from the University of Texas at Dallas. If I’m not at home reading a book or doing laundry, I’m probably at the bookstore, nannying three rambunctious boys, or stuck on the side of the road with car trouble. I’m a reader, a writer, and a bit of a crazy person.
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