Fans of Real Friends and Be Prepared will love this energetic, affecting graphic memoir, in which a young girl uses her active imagination to navigate middle school as well as the fallout from her parents’ divorce.
We chat with Tori Sharp all about Just Pretend, writing, book recommendations, and so much more!
Hi, Tori! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hello! I’m a very extroverted artist who lives in Seattle and gets excited about flowers, espresso, and my tiny poodle. I primarily write and draw children’s comics, including my upcoming, debut graphic memoir, Just Pretend, which will be hitting bookshelves in just a few days on May 18th! I also love to swing dance, and I listen to far too many podcasts.
How is your 2021 going in comparison to that other year?
Still about the same, but with a handful more hope sprinkled in. As I write this, my dad and stepmom are driving cross-country to visit Seattle, and I’m so excited to give them both an unreasonable, nearly incalculable number of hugs during their stay. I’m also eagerly awaiting the day I can once again sit in coffee shops to draw my comics, and having my book release to look forward to has been a huge boost to morale!
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The first book I remember reading is The Napping House by Audrey Wood and illustrated by Don Wood. The book that made me want to become an author was The School Story by Andrew Clements—when I first read it, I was already writing novels, but that book helped me realize that writing could be my job! A book I can’t stop thinking about is Rachel Smythe’s webcomic Lore Olympus, the first volume of which will be coming out in print later this year.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
All of my earliest memories involve writing and making up stories, and it always came naturally to me. I wrote poetry first! I was maybe six when my dad bought me a special journal to write poems in because he noticed that I loved the cadence of words. Around the same time, I started writing short stories, and I still have character sketches from a novel I began writing when I was eight. Writing and illustrating always went hand-in-hand for me, even before I made comics.
Your debut graphic novel Just Pretend is out on May 18th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Best friends write books together!
What can readers expect?
Readers can expect a playful, hopeful story about friendship as well as vulnerability about the messy impacts that divorce can have a family. Just Pretend is a love letter to a young writer’s first novel, and it explores how helpful storytelling can be as a way for kids (and adults!) to process and communicate emotions. There is a story-within-a-story that has magic crystals, fairies, shadow monsters, and epic battles. Readers will discover that sometimes when you’re on a quest to find what you’ve lost, what you’re really looking for might change along the way.
Where did the inspiration for Just Pretend come from?
I’ve read lots of books where a kid lives with a single parent due to divorce, but few where the main character splits their time between two or more parents’ or guardians’ homes. It’s remarkably common for kids to live in multiple homes compared to how many stories reflect that kind of life. So with Just Pretend, I wanted to tell a story about that! At first I thought about exploring this idea through fictional characters—I started writing a graphic novel about a young dragon whose divorced parents are neighbors—but I didn’t get far with that before I realized that it would be more powerful and straightforward to tell the story of my own childhood. Sometimes kids can feel more connected to a story when they know that the characters are real people who experienced similar things to what they or their friends are going through!
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing or illustrating and how you were able to overcome them?
What are you talking about? Drawing comics is super easy. (I’m kidding, obviously!) When I started inking the final art in Just Pretend, I felt really insecure about my drawing techniques. All I could see were the mistakes. So, I pulled some of my most-loved graphic novels off my bookshelf and made myself find all the places where the inks didn’t look quite perfect. When I’d first read those books, I hadn’t noticed a single thing I would have changed about the art, but now by looking closely I found that lots of the lines were wobbly or crooked or blotchy. And those weren’t “mistakes,” they were just part of the art. I realized that I was being too much of a perfectionist and that no one would notice all the little details I was fussing over. This helped me overcome that art block and have more fun with drawing my book!
What is your creative process like when it comes to illustrating?
Creativity is such a messy thing, and I feel like my process changes all the time, but when I started drawing Just Pretend, I decided that I needed to love one thing about every panel. That could be anything—a fun expression, a silly background detail, the overall composition, the way that the panel flowed into the rest of the page, or some satisfying dialogue. My process is about finding joy in the little things when I draw, which keeps me motivated so that the work stays sustainable. It also helps the whole book really come to life!
Is there anything you hope readers take away from Just Pretend?
I hope that young writers will take away hope that they can *really* become authors one day! And I hope that any kid who sees themselves in the troubles that Tori and her friends go through will feel seen and take away some courage to talk about it with people they trust. The book is really about communication! Writing stories is a great way to communicate your feelings to yourself and whoever reads them, but at a certain point you also need to voice those feelings to the people you love, too!
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The best advice is to write what you know, and the worst advice is to write what you know. (No one told me how hard it would be!!) Writing takes an excessive amount of mental and emotional effort, and that gets more intense the closer the subject matter is to your own lived experience. But the reward of writing something deeply personal is so completely worth it, both for your own benefit and for the readers who will feel connected to your story because of its authenticity.
What’s next for you?
I have looked into a crystal ball, and it’s full to bursting with comics. I’m not sure who put so many comics into that thing! Just Pretend is the first book in a two-book contract, so I am working on a second graphic novel for kids. I’ve never been more excited about a story idea! It hits all of the sweet spots for me; it’s the perfect intersection of the big topics I can’t wait to write about and the type of playful, upbeat story that I love most to read. I keep thinking about this story and crying about how excited I am to put that book into the world. And comics take ages to make, so I’ll be able to work on that for the next couple of years… and then hopefully keep making comics for my whole life!
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
I have so much love for Svetlana Chmakova’s Berrybrook Middle School Series of graphic novels! They deal with big, important topics with a lot of heart and in a way that feels just right for creative kids.
