Surfing Education the Hard Way

By Michael Hixon
(Updated: Thursday, July 12, 2007 10:11 AM PDT)

When Molly Browne is uplifted from her comfortable Lubbock, Texas, home by her mother following her parents' divorce to move to Marineland Mobile Park in Hermosa Beach, the teen's world is turned upside down but she learns life lessons while taking surf classes in the young adult novel “Surf Ed.”

Manhattan Beach screenwriter-turned-novelist Karol Ann Hoeffner's second novel was published last month following the success of “All You've Got,” an MTV film based on Hoeffner's screenplay that was eventually turned into a novel published by Simon & Schuster last year.

A Texas native, Hoeffner moved to LA. after winning $1,000 from a national screenwriting contest. She drew inspiration for her latest book from several sources.

“It really came from living in the South Bay and being married to a man who is part fish and having a daughter who surfs,” Hoeffner said. “I love to sail and love to take a kayak out. So you sit on the beach and you hear stories. I had known I wanted to tell some of those stories. Some of the stories the characters tell in the book are based on stories older surfers have told me.”

In “Surf Ed.,” Molly discovers that some of her credits from her Texas high school won't transfer. So despite the fact she's never surfed, she enrolls in surf ed instead of the sixth-period “loser P.E.” Mentored by her surfing instructor, Duke, a former surfing great who's fighting his own personal demons, Molly finally makes it past the breakers, but her feeling toward her high school crush, Kai, takes a back seat to issues of life and death. Molly learns that surfing is only “part” of what the class will teach her.

From her clothes to her naivete of surf culture, Molly is a fish out of water, not much unlike Hoeffner when she first came to California.

“I thought having someone who, like many of the readers, doesn't have the opportunity or advantage of growing up on the coast of Southern California to have the protagonist be the eyes into that culture,” Hoeffner said. “It's just fun to write about a culture from the point of view of someone who has never seen anything like that before. I must say, as well, I drew upon my own experience of being from Texas and moving to Southern California. Even though that has been some time ago, I was able to recall those feelings and those perceptions and emotions and from, I must say, a particularly Texas point of view.”

She added, “Just the idea that you can surf away physical education requirements is very foreign and very romantic to the rest of the country.”

For a number of years, Hoeffner's career focused on screenplays until she was asked to adapt “All You've Got” into a young adult novel. She said she was “pretty much terrified moving into prose.”

“There are limitations because you only write in a screenplay what you can see or what you can hear,” she said. “You don't go into someone's mind. You don't go into back story. It's all about action. It's all about what's on the screen. When suddenly I could write a book it was as if I had too many options. The whole writerly world opened up to me and it was terrifying. Once I dove in, I really enjoyed it and I found the process very liberating. I still love doing screenplays and, in fact, while I was writing ‘Surf Ed.' I was doing a rewrite on an MTV movie. I was kind of living in both worlds.”

She added, “On the second novel, I guess I felt more comfortable in my skin and was a little more certain of where I wanted it to go. I hate to use the word confident but maybe a little bit. I felt like I could finish the book.”

Hoeffner said plans for a book signing at Barnes & Noble in Torrance are currently in the works but no dates have yet been set.