Homework, bullies and pets: Jeff Kinney on why kids love his books

Most authors are secretive about their works-in-progress. Jeff Kinney? Not so much. In the first few minutes of our interview, he’s sharing his laptop screen and showing me pages of notes for his next book. If you were a nine-year-old, this would be like Leonardo da Vinci saying, “Check out these sketches I’ve been doodling for that Sistine Chapel gig…”

Kinney is a rock star among pre-teen readers. Heck, even kids who don’t read still read Kinney. His Diary of a Wimpy Kid is the fourth bestselling book series of all time – we’re not just counting kids’ books, we’re talking all books. There are 19 official entries, and Kinney has penned spin-offs as well as a series of feature film adaptations. Then there’s Hot Mess, the live stage show the author himself performs, which will bring him to Australia in May.

The Wimpy Kid books follow Greg Heffley, a young teen chronicling his high-school misadventures. His family are classic comic foils – mean older brother Rodrick, annoying younger brother Manny – but there’s genuine affection given to characters like Greg’s bestie Rowley. The series is written and drawn in a deliberately simple style, printed on the kind of lined paper you’d find in a homework notebook. It all creates the sense that any kid could have made this – and you could too.

“If a kid picks up one of my books and opens it, they say, ‘Oh, this? I could do this. This looks like fun.’ And that’s how reading should be. I think the handwritten font is friendly, and the cartoons are fun. But I think that the humour is the thing. If the books weren’t funny, I don’t think I’d have 19 in the series. I pride myself on the joke writing and I think kids respond to that.”

I’d heard that an average Wimpy Kid book contains around 300 to 400 jokes. “Yeah, now it’s more like 1000,” he says. That’s when he shares his desktop, navigating past the kinds of files you wouldn’t show a journalist (“Ticketmaster password”, “Health log”) to “Book 20 ideation”. Here it is, the Sistine Chapel Ceiling in Apple Notes form.

It’s a brainstorm of thoughts and joke ideas spiralling out from the concept of “cake”. The sheer number of gags contained on each of these pages makes 1000 jokes per book seem like child’s play.

Kinney’s global success means that he travels a lot, and he often wonders what it is about his writing that translates well in places with very different cultures from the US.

“I think it’s that the types of things I’m writing about are familiar to every kid, like having parents and homework and bullies and pets,” he says. “This is just the common language that we share. We went through the same things, you know? And we laugh at the same things. So especially in a time of real political upheaval here in the US, it gives me a lot of hope that there is so much commonality between kids around the world.”

Kinney grew up reading the likes of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. “I could see the protagonists as a reflection of myself. Those were kids just like me. And it never occurred to me at that time – nor until much, much later in life – that every kid doesn’t get that experience of validation.”

He hopes that kids see themselves in his writing, he says. In keeping with that spirit, I’ve outsourced some of my questions to a class of grade threes and fours at a local primary school. Number one: Are Kinney’s characters based on real people?

“They are. Every one of the Heffleys is an exaggerated funhouse mirror version of somebody in my own family,” Kinney says. “The rest of the characters, not so much. They’re mostly fictional. But Greg’s friendship with Rowley is based on a friendship I had growing up.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends, but he and I had each other, and we built this kind of world together. Even though Rowley’s not based on him, the relationship is based on my friendship with my best friend.”

Question two: Which of his books is his favourite? “There’s a book I wrote called Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Adventure, and I wrote it in about a month and a half, just before the pandemic struck. I wrote it really fast, and I’m really proud of it because I think it’s fun and funny and sort of fresh.”

Question three is so broad that most adult journalists would avoid it, but it’s also one that every kid with a pen in their hand would like an answer to: Why did you start writing, Jeff Kinney?

“I felt like being a cartoonist was what I was born to do. I just needed to figure out a way to get my cartoons into print somehow.”

Kinney spent almost a decade writing his first Wimpy Kid book, all the time with an adult audience in mind. Yes: one of the world’s most successful kids’ books began as a series for grown-ups.

“I thought I was writing something that was looking back on childhood. In those eight, nine years I was working on it, I was thinking of this as something more like The Wonder Years or A Christmas Story, where it was childhood seen through the lens of an adult’s backwards-looking perspective.”

At the time, he was working for a website with a large audience of schoolkids. When he began posting Wimpy Kid content there, it struck a chord. “It started to get a lot of traction online before I ever showed it to a publisher.”

I don’t know what Kinney’s publisher would think of him sharing the plot of a book that’s yet to be released. I know what an actual fan would think, since my own nine-year-old enters the room during our interview. It’s testament to Kinney’s connection with his readers that he instantly welcomes the newcomer into the conversation, asking for feedback on some of the novel’s plot points and even revealing the cover art of the book.

That kind of generosity is partly how his upcoming live show came about. In recent years, his book signings have attracted queues three hours long, so he and his team transformed them into interactive lines full of activities to do while waiting. That grew into a full-scale interactive stage show – first came Diper Overlode, a rock concert with “live performers and fog machines and laser lights”. Now he’s bringing his new show to Australia, adapted from his most recent book, Hot Mess.

“The conceit of the show is that … I’m quitting the book business and we’re opening a restaurant, and I need to hire waiters and staff and chefs and everything like that.”

It seems unlikely that Kinney will be quitting the biz for real any time soon. But you have to wonder why someone who has sold 290 million books wants to get up on stage and clown around.

It all comes back to the gags, he says. “I don’t think I started to get good at storytelling until about book 12. Now I think I’ve kind of gotten the hang of it. But my first books especially were essentially a bunch of jokes strung together.”

If you’re a nine-year-old, you’ll say that’s no bad thing.

Jeff Kinney appears at Sydney Writers’ Festival (19-27 May) and at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, May 31, presented by The Wheeler Centre.

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