Trivia / I Kissed Shara Wheeler

• Author Appeal: McQuiston based the book on many of their favorite pieces of media growing up. They pretty much combined all the common tropes of Romantic Comedy and Mystery Fiction, subverted around half of them to Hell and back while playing the other half totally straight and then added a healthy dose of queerness to get the basic plot of I Kissed Shara Wheeler.
• Creator Recovery: McQuiston has revealed that during the process of writing Shara they were just starting to unpack their own religious trauma from their childhood and adolescence. They note that actually writing I Kissed Shara Wheeler helped them with this the most. They have also stated that there was an earlier version of Shara that they wrote twenty-five thousand words of before scrapping, because through the whole thing there were unrelenting undertones of contempt and derision aimed at both the setting and the teenage characters (the protagonist included). Reading this early draft, McQuiston realized that they needed to learn to empathize with their own teenage self to write teenage characters. This realization helped lead to a much more respectful final product that McQuiston describes as something they believe could've potentially helped them if they had picked it up as a teenager.
• Write What You Know: Casey McQuiston grew up in the religious South and attended an Evangelical Christain school. They have called Shara "the most personal thing I've ever written".