The Press Box - How to Write a Children's Book With Jeff Kinney, Author of ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Bryan is joined by author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney to discuss his career and book series 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’ They touch on how Kinney got a book deal at Comic-Con, how he utilizes systematic inventive thinking to help his writing process, how he balances both jokes and big ideas throughout his books, and what it’s like going on book tours for children. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jeff Kinney Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Production Assistant: Jonathan Kermah Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head into the Ringerverse to stay up to date with all things superheroes and nerd culture entertainment. Hosted by a rotating lineup of superfans at The Ringer, including Mallory Rubin and Van Lathen, shows will provide instant reactions to blockbuster releases, insightful backstories on canon, and mind-bending theories, as well as fresh takes on the latest news and rumors. Check out The Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Thanksgiving media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox Friday. Brian Curtis of The Ringer here, along with producer John.

Jonathan Kerma, who is sitting in for Erica. Thanksgiving is a time for family, which brings me to a little family issue I'm having, Segway. As many of you know, I'm a dad, I've got a son who's eight and a daughter who's six, and when I wake up in the morning, I want to be funny dad. The kind of dad who can make his kids laugh anytime, anywhere. As the term dad joke implies, I'm not trying to be George Carlin in his prime here. I'm talking about getting a nice chuckle, you know, something a little bigger than a charity laugh from my kids. Here's the thing, though, on my best day, I could be that dad.

But when my kids read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, they laugh like crazy. And it's the kind of laughter that's uncontrolled the way I used to laugh when I was watching a Pink Panther movie when I was a kid. It's a little unnerving for me because these two humans have been my captive audience for their entire lives. And now this outsider can access their comic sensibilities way better than I can. So I wanted to know how the author of these books, Jeff Kenny, does it. So we brought him on for one of our how-to podcasts,

How to Write a Children's Book. Now for the uninitiated, the Diary of Oimpy Kid series, including the new book, which is called Big Shot, has sold 250 million copies, not a misprint. They are reliable number one New York Times bestsellers, there are movies, etc., etc. Now, a lot of people want to write children's books, as we see every time a big name author or celebrity pumps one out, but there's a very specific art to it.

Certain things you can do and certain things you can't do, certain nerves you want to hit. Those are the things I want to find out today. And by the way, my son Owen is going to chip in a question too. Here's how to write a children's book with Jeff Kenny. All right, Jeff, when did you first think about being a cartoonist? I thought about being a cartoonist from the time. I was in, I'd say middle school or high school. Every morning when I woke up, I came downstairs and the Washington Post was open because my father would have already read through it, opened up the comics page, and he left for work.

And then I'd pick it up from there. And, you know, I just wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be on the comics page. I wanted to be like Charles Schultz or Bill Waterson or Gary Larson, Burke. those were the guys that I really idolized, and I thought I thought I might have a shot at it, but it turns out I didn't. Which one of those guys spoke to you the most? Yeah, they all spoke to me in different ways at different times, I think.

I think Peanuts was just always there, right? And cartoonists can never tell how much they've been influenced by Peanuts, but he really created the language of commercial cartoons, I think. Brethard was so contemporary and so edgy in a way. Waterson was more like a fine artist, like unachievable. His style was unachievable by the common man like myself. So I think Larson is who I'm going to land on. So he did the Far Side.

He wasn't a great artist, but his comics were better for that. And now when you see the collections today of the Far Side, they're colorized and they look like great. art, you know, but there, he's a doodler and his, his comics really evolved over time. You go to the University of Maryland, you draw a comic in the school paper called Igduf. What was Igduf? Igduf was, it was a, it was a very strange cartoon. It was this character who had a really big nose and big eyes and big ears and he,

who's really short. And he was the manifestation of me as a college freshman. You know, I was very, I was very, very. green. I was pretty awkward. And so I sort of channeled my, you know, my persona through this weird cartoon character. And it was great because Marilyn had a daily paper, which is sort of rare. And we had, I think we had a readership of about 30,000 a day, which was just great. So for me, once I got into the newspaper, which is called the Diamondback, that was kind of lights out. Like I always had the decision to make every day, which was, should I do this term paper that

will be seen by my one professor, or should I do my comic, which will be seen by 30,000 people? And my grades really suffered, but I cut my teeth there working on Ig Duf. And this became a big deal. I mean, I saw you were profiled in the Washington Post at age 22. there was Ig-Doof merch being sold at University of Maryland basketball games. Yeah. And you know what? The Washington Post thing came out of nowhere.

I'm still very mystified by that. I mean, here I had this college strip. It was successful for what it was, but it was still a college strip at Maryland. It wasn't drawn especially well. And all of a sudden, the Post wanted to do this article, I think they called it like Igduf takes on the world or something like that. And I was like, I have no idea. I'm like living in the Truman show right now, you know, where the post is doing this big write-up and saying that Igduf is going to be the next big thing in comics.

And then it wasn't. But that, I think that caused some psychological damage because I was like, but the post said, you know, and it didn't happen that way. So the plan after college is to get the strip syndicated and go off and running from there? Yeah, that was a dream. I had these kind of parallel tracks that I was on. I was actually a pretty capable computer programmer at the time, but my grades didn't reflect that. I was also, I turned into a criminal justice major because I was really fascinated by court cases and trials. And I'd go to the courthouse in Washington, D.C., almost every day during lunch, during my summer job.

And I worked for ATF. And so I was actually planning on becoming an ATF agent right out of college. But I had this rock star dream of becoming a cartoonist and working on that at night. So I don't have a straight answer to your question because it was like it was a bad plan that I had. So you send it out to syndicators? Is that how this happens and see if anyone's interested? Yes, you do. And I don't know what you do now.

at that time, there were probably about five big cartoon syndicates. You've probably heard of King Features and Tribune Media and United Media Press or whatever their names are now. But, you know, I would work on a submission packet for months, three months, four months. I'd send my packet out to the syndicates, and they were the ones that kind of distribute to the papers. and then they would send back really anonymous and soul-sucking rejection letters that, you know, start off by saying, dear creator. And the only positive note or the only sign of life I ever got at the other end was a guy named Jay Kennedy, who I think was with King Features Syndicate. He wrote that he hates the name Ig Duf and I should change it. And that's all I got.

That was the constructive feedback. This comic, which I'm not going to buy, has a terrible name. Please change it immediately. But of course, I read that as, you know, so you're saying there's a chance. So no love from the syndicators. Then what do you do? Then I think a lot about it. And I do realize at the time that the landscape is really changing.

You know, newspapers were starting to compete with the internet. and that's when newspapers were starting to, you know, there used to be two big newspapers per city and they started going down to one. So the opportunities got less and less. So a syndicate used to launch like five to eight strips a year and maybe one or two would be a hit. By this time they were launching probably about one or two. Nowadays, they launch maybe one every two or three years. You know, it's a different landscape. But it was changing. And I was studying. And I was studying. that. You know, I realize it was changing. My chances, my odds weren't very good of having success, even if I had something good. And that's when I was keeping a journal to kind of motivate me.

And the journal was a bit of text and then cartoon illustrations. I did that for a few years. And I looked at it and I said, you know what? Maybe this could turn into something else. Maybe this could turn into like a long-form cartoon, and I could kind of sneak my cartoons into books. And so that's what I did. I worked on that for, I worked on Diary of Wimpy Kid for about eight years before I showed it to anyone. Greg Heffley, the titular Wimpy Kid of the Books. Why was it appealing for him to be wimpy? Because I was wimpy as a kid.

I was, you know, I was, the truth is I was really kind of an average kid in terms of athletics and things. like that. In a lot of ways, I felt like kind of an invisible kid. I was reasonably smart, but, you know, just I wouldn't have made much of an impression on anyone. You know, going through the school system, I think if you asked any of my teachers who had me, you know, do you remember Jeff Kinney? They might be like, oh, yeah, but I don't think so. And so I wanted to, I wanted to write about somebody who didn't seem like a hero, wasn't brave, wasn't, you know, wasn't the son of a wizard or a Greek god or something like that. I wanted to write about somebody like me.

In the new book, Big Shot, he's talking about his lack of athletic talent. He says, I'll bet there are lots of kids out there just like me. Yeah, he does. And they need books too, right? As sports books. And this is what was kind of fascinating to me about writing a sports book, is that I'm very interested in structure, the way movies are structured. structured, sorry.

And I realize that every sports movie is really just the same. It's, you know, if you've got a story about a bad team or a team or an individual that need to grow a lot, what happens is in the second act, they go through their season. They sort of plod through it. And then in the third act, they get their act together. And then the third act is always the tournament or the big fight. if it's a boxing movie or maybe if it's like a baseball movie it's just one game like the bad news bears and i thought you know it's really sort of implausible that you get this team of losers together and then they

get their act together and then they they win it all or they lose it all um so i i try to figure out a way to subvert it and i'm happy with the way that i did one thing i also liked is that greg in the book is very conscious of the whole idea of sports movies so he's trying to get his teammates to sign over their movie rights in anticipation. This will be a marketable story someday. Well, you think about it. You think of a movie like, what is it called? We Were Titans, or I'm forgetting the name of the movie. Any of those movies that's based on a real-life team, like, something like Hoosiers, I don't know if that was fictional or factual. But, you know, any one of those stories, those kids who are on the team, they're not the ones

benefiting from it. It's the writer, right? It's the writer, it's the studio. So you can tell the story of this team, but those guys don't see a penny. So yeah, Greg's definitely going to look out for himself and get people a sign on the dotted line. You've said that the theme of these books is pre-adolescent angst. Why is that period so interesting? I think a lot of, most of the reason why it's so interesting is because we enter this period called middle school. For me, it was junior high.

and you really and truly have kids who haven't hit puberty yet mixing in with kids who are shaving twice a day. That's what it was like for me. And you really do have kids who are half the size of other kids. I always felt like junior high, it was like a two-year sliver where I grew up in Maryland. And I felt even then like they were trying to sort of segregate us from the rest of society while we went through this awful pupil. stage, you know, of morphing from our, you know, young selves into our adult forms. So I think that's a great area for comedy. A lot of angst, a lot of comedy, a lot of survival day to day.

Yes, indeed. Yeah. And that's what I felt like. I remember, I was just thinking about this the other day, we had real bullies back then. There was no, like, bully awareness, right? Bullies operated in the shadows back then. And I remember one time, for some reason, during one of our PE classes, we were lined up along the top row of the bleachers.

And the bleachers were closed. So, you know, you're up there. There's no way out. And this bully just went down the line. And he punched every kid as hard as he could in the leg. And then, like, before he got to me, the bell rang. And, you know, it was time to go. But everybody agreed that we need.

needed to line up exactly where we were the next day. And so needless to say, I didn't show up the next day. I called in sick for that punching. And one of the interesting things, too, about the book is that it is Greg's diary. He is writing his own story. So what did that allow you to do in narrative terms? Yeah, it's interesting. I'm a bookstore owner now. And I've gotten to be much more aware of other people's writings, other people's point of view. But what's really great about a book, and a book can do this better than anything else, even movies, is that they teach empathy because you step right into the head of a character that you're reading about. And so take Holden Caulfield, for example, is that you sort of get sucked into his way of thinking because he,

you know, because he's telling the story. And I think in a way, Greg is similar. And I think in a way, to him because he's not exactly an unreliable narrator, but he's in a way he's kind of not to be trusted. You learn things about Greg that make you say, you know what? I'm not sure I was exactly told the full story, which is one of the reasons I came up with another series called a Dyer of an awesome friendly kid, which is Greg's best friend, you know, just so that you'd see the other side of the coin. It's interesting, too, because in all these books, he's really recording his own misery, right? He is. You know, in the first few pages of the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, he says, one day when I'm rich and famous, I won't have time to answer people's stupid questions.

You know, and that's why he's, he's creating this journal. But that's sort of all you need to know about Greg Heffley is that he's not a fully formed person, but he's very sure of himself. So that's a good combination for a comedy because the reader knows that he's not going to be rich and famous one day. He's probably going to live kind of a middle of the road existence. But right now, he thinks that that's what he's going to become. And I think that a lot

of the comedy comes from the dissonance that that writing causes the reader. So you're sketching out all this stuff in a book. You think you might have something here. What did you want your illustrations of Greg Heffley to look like? I wanted my illustrations

to look simple. I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. The truth is I didn't really have the chops. I could see that a Brooke Brethead or a Charles Schultz or Bill Watterson, that they were fine artists. And I was not. And I couldn't become one either. So what I did with Diary of a Mute Kid is I actually simplified my style further to make it plausible that a middle school kid could do this.

In doing so, I really learned about the essence of cartooning. And the essence of cartooning is simplicity. It's trying to use as few lines as possible to make the biggest possible impact. You put, you wind up putting the book online. That's how it gets out to the world first. Yeah, and I lucked out there. I worked for a company that owned Fun Brain, which at the dawn of the internet was like the go-to school classroom kind of website.

and, you know, I don't even know how many millions of people we had visiting that every day, but what it translated into was an audience of at least 70,000 a day in those early days. And by the time I was done putting up my first draft, I think I had, it must have been 21 million readers or something like that. So this whole built-in audience comes to it through the website. And are you also read, are you, you, you didn't know quite at the beginning would it be a kid's book or whether it'd be more of a Matt Grainig style of a kid's book but actually for adults kind of thing?

You know, that's really interesting that you bring in Matt Graney because he may have my experience with reading those books, the Life in Hell or Life is Hell series, may have influenced this idea in me that I was writing something for adults. I actually didn't think of this as a kid's property at all, not even for a second in the eight years that I wrote it. I was thinking about comics as being four grownups because my father is the one who introduced me to Carl Barks Comics, the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge classics from the 1940s and 50s. And then he was the one that opened the comics page in the Washington Post. And so as I was writing, I thought I was writing one big, fat book that could sit in the humor section of the bookstore.

where there were all sorts of things like the collection of Calvin and Hobbs and a book of dirty jokes and things like that. I thought it would just sit there like a brick. But I hadn't, until you just mentioned Matt Graining, I hadn't thought about that at all. But it's true. That's what I was reading at the time.

Right before I started working on Diary of a Wimpe Kidd, I was reading those kind of edgy comics that weren't geared towards children. How do you get a book deal? How do I get one or how did? How did you get a book deal? I, like a foolish person, printed out like 12 pages of my finished manuscript and walked around New York Comic-Con. And which I didn't understand it all was like a consumer-facing gig.

I thought it was kind of, you know, anybody who likes comics and wants to kind of swim in those waters should be. be there. But I walked around. Nobody wanted to see what I had any time I tried to pull it out of my backpack. People, you know, looked visibly alarmed and tried to stop me from doing it. And then what happened was somebody, I said, oh, you know, I've got this this web comic that's got like 21 million readers. Like, does that mean anything to anyone? And they're like, I don't know. But Abrams just published something called Mom's Cancer, which started off as a webcomic. So I was like Abrams, Abrams, Abrams. And I walked around, I saw the Abrams logo.

And I walked right up to the guy who happened to be the acquiring editor of Mom's Cancer. His name is Charlie Kochman. And, you know, I said, I'd love to show you what I'm working on. And he took a look at just the first page, which is Greg getting punched by a bully. And he started laughing right away. And he said, he didn't even read it. He just said, this is exact, excuse me, he said, this is exactly what we're looking for. And it's why we came here.

So for me, it was an unusual path. I was a bit naive to pursue it in that way, but I really lucked out. That's a completely miraculous book deal story. Yeah, it is. And you know what's really funny is that both he and I in that moment, we both said later that we felt like we were sort of recording the moment because we felt like something big had happened. And it's, that's really cool, you know. And it almost didn't happen because I came to Comic-Con on a Saturday,

and they had oversold it. And so I was going to have to go home. And my wife and I didn't have any money. I couldn't afford to pay for a hotel. But then I found out that Billy Joel was playing that night at Madison Square Garden. It was one of the series of like nine concerts. And I was, I called my wife. I said, Julie, can I please stay the night and, you know, see Billy Joel?

and she said yes and then that's what kept me in New York for one more night and then the next day I went back and that's when I encountered Charlie so it was a miraculous publishing story. Yeah,

you thread your way through all these people dressed like Boba Fett you go to the right booth and find the right guy who can give you a book deal at the right booth and this is, and I heard the first one sold

100,000 copies or something like that. Oh gosh, I don't know. I don't know how many it sold you mean by now or back then? Well, at the time. It was a big seller at the time?

Yeah. What happened was it, about two or three weeks after I came out, it landed on the New York Times list. That was a shock. You know, it just didn't see it coming at all. And it was debuted at number seven. And then it went eight, nine. And I was like, okay, well, this will be cool.

You know, if I go to my high school reunion, I can say I'm a New York Times bestseller. And then it sort of rallied. lead. And now it's been on the list for, gosh, like, I think about like 730 weeks or something like that. So it's been a crazy, it's been a crazy journey since then. The true mark of success is having bragging rights to your high school reunion. None of the other stuff. That is. Yeah, my all guys high school reunion, which I haven't been to one of those, you know, I don't think that I ever will. But I can't really see myself bragging to anyone at something. like that. You said in 2009 to the New York Times, I'm not a real author and not a real cartoonist.

I'm a failed cartoonist. You don't really feel that way, do you? Well, you've done your homework. I am a failed newspaper cartoonist, but I will say this, is that, and this is, you can play me the world's smallest violin here, but I'm not really embraced as an author at straight writing conventions, and I'm definitely not considered a real cartoonist at comics conventions. So I fit in this sort of hazy middle. You know, I have this kind of hybrid thing, but I've seen on really well-established comic sites where they really think this stuff over, they have declared my work to be not a comic, you know, because there's text.

So they, you know, so I don't really fit in either world very well. When you sit down to write a new book, Jeff, do you write? write an outline? I don't write an outline. I write jokes. These days, I like to have about 750 jokes going into a book. That's a good number for me. In the old days, it was like 250, which made for some pretty shoddy books. But I spend a lot of time sort of iterating. I use this technique called systematic inventive thinking, which I did not come up with. But it causes me to be creative within a system. And it's, it's a, you know, it's, it's a great way to kind of grind out jokes. Systematic, innovative thinking. So what is that like in? Yeah, systematic, inventive thinking.

Inventive thinking. It's a little hard to explain, but I'll, I'll try very quickly. It's got two really big steps, right? One of them is to list the components of something. And then the second step is to apply a few tools to the different components, right? So let's say, for example, that I have a book where I'm writing about an airplane trip, right? So the first step is to list all the parts of an airplane, everything that's in it, everything that's outside of it. So the pilots, the seats, the barf bags, the wings, everything, right? The bathrooms. Then, okay, so that's not a very creative step, right? I can get about 250. components out of that. And then the next step is to apply tools like multiplication, division,

and especially subtraction to each component in turn, right? So, for example, if I applied subtraction to the pilot, that starts to suggest comedy, right? If you take away a pilot of a plane, you're going to be in trouble pretty soon. So that will eventually turn into the idea of Greg saying, you know what, if I was a pilot and I encountered some turbulence, like I'd be out of there, right? And so there's a picture of him actually parachuting away from the plane, you know, to save his own skin while, you know, presumably the other passengers perish. But, you know, I can get, I can get lots and lots and lots of jokes out of just applying those tools to all those components. It was a game changer for me when I started to use that. And when you say 750 jokes,

this new book has a little over 200 pages. So this is a rate of three, three and a half jokes per page as it turns out at the end. Yeah, well, I burned through a lot of bad material. One of the things that happens when you use a technique like that is that you come up with a lot of crap and then you have to decide what's good and what's not good. But my next book, I think, is going to be about rock and roll or Greg's brother's band loaded diaper. And so right off the bat, you know, I'll start with the components.

I'll say, you know, drumsticks and guitar picks and Marshall amps and all those things. Boom, boom, boom, list all those things. And then I'll start taking them away. I'll start splitting them in half. And, you know, once I'm done, I'll have a big pile of jokes. So you have this big pile of jokes. And then how does the narrative come out of the pile of jokes? Well, sometimes it doesn't.

And if you've read any of my first nine books or eight books, you would say, yeah, I don't think that he's too focused on narrative. I was never actually that interested in telling a good story, at least not before. That's really changed now. But my, you know, I was always much more interested in making you laugh and trying to get as many laughs out of a page as possible. That started to change when I got to work, you know, on the live action movies, because then we had to care about narrative. And I realized that my books weren't really adaptable in their current form because they just didn't have good structure. So now from book nine, which was called the Long Hall on, I've gotten a little better and a little better. And I actually think that this book,

Big Shot, is the first book that I would say, okay, that's a narrative. That's a narrative that I think is actually pretty good. A scene, a scene, scenes leading up to a conclusion. Yeah. And definitely a classic three-act structure. So definitely cinematic. I know exactly how to turn that into a screenplay. It's interesting because when I read some of them, I always took it as you were writing in the way a child tells a story, which is in a very nonlinear way. When I ask my kids, what happened at school today? I get the opening act and then I get 18 diversions into other things. And then if I really beg, I get them to tell me how the day ended. Yeah, well, yeah, you hit it right on the head. This is how a child would tell a story. And it's

It's also how a 28-year-old man would tell a story. I'm 50 now. I've learned a little bit about telling stories. But I've also got ADD. You may have noticed on this call is that it's hard for me to concentrate on a certain topic. It's really hard for me to sit still in class, listen to a teacher, listen to a lecturer. Now I can't do it. And so I think my mind hops around and that probably presents itself on the page.

We talked about pre-adolescent angst. What does writerly angst look like for you? Writerly angst looks like to me the worry or the concern that I'll never be able to write another funny thing. It's absolutely wild to me that there will be a book out in November of next year. And at this moment, I don't know anything but the theme. So it just feels like, you know, it's sort of like if I said to you right now, say something funny that's a that, you know, a knock-knock joke. It's like puts you on the spot. It's hard to do. And so I sort of have to trust in myself because I've done it before, but there's no evidence going forward that I could do it. You know, there's nothing to suggest that I could do it based on my current thinking.

Does it hit you at night when you wake up in the morning? When do you feel that? A stress over that. Yeah. Not really. What happens is it turns into a kind of a self-loathing when I actually start to write because I write lots and lots of bad stuff. And so then I just, then I really hate myself for writing bad stuff. And it just, I go through this cycle every single year. You know, I'll write, I'll hate it. I'll think I can never write another funny thing. My old stuff was better.

All this kind of stuff. You go through it too. I'm sure as you've written, it's like, it's a little scary. And then you pull through somehow. I was going to say it sounds a lot like journalism. I've lost it. I don't know how to do this anymore. Right, right.

I'll never be able to do it. Yeah. You know, I love journalism. Like, I thought I was going to work in newspapers for the rest of my life. I end up as a production manager of the Diamondback in college. And then I ended up at a newspaper as my first job. And I just love that kinetic feeling. And I love being on deadline.

It's a great, it's a great trade. A lot of kids' books, and this is one of the things I always responded to with yours, have this moral universe, a particular moral universe, where if you behave well, you are rewarded in the end. And if you behave badly, you are punished suitably, right? This is the Berenstein-Ber's expanded universe, which we are so familiar with. Whereas the moral universe of Greg Heffley is not like that at all, I feel. It is just the opposite.

Good behavior is not necessarily rewarded, bad behavior is not punished. Yes. One of my favorite things in the first book is that Greg's mom challenges him to do the right thing. And then Greg decides that the right thing to do for him is to let his best friend take the fall. And Greg doesn't see that it's like, that's problematic. He's like, I did the right thing, just like my mom asked. And then to cap it off, she takes him out for ice cream. So there's a, there's a great case of the, you know, a normal kind of storytelling method being subverted. And that the, the, the humor is really coming from dissonance, right?

Which dissonance isn't something that's really often introduced to young kids. But this is all a byproduct, right? Because I really did write Diary Vosunpy Kid for adults. And so that was my really big worry when my publisher said, you know what, you've actually written a children series for kids. I was like, oh my gosh, like, are they going to get Greg Heffley? Am I going to ruin lives? but it's been sort of instructive because I realize that most of the time when adults write for kids,

they start with the question of what do I want to teach kids? It puts adults in the position of being an authority on something and being a grown-up and kids being beneath them and needing to be taught. And I certainly think that that's appropriate in lots of different places, but not really in comedy. And comedy, you know, a kid doesn't want their, you know, comedy is sugar and they don't really need their vegetables with the sugar. Kids respond to the moral universe you create you think in a different way than the conventional moral universe we're talking about? That's a good question. Let's be fair, is that there have been parents, librarians, different gatekeepers who have had problems with Greg Heffley. And they should. The central joke of Greg Heffley

is that he's a mess. He's a messy person, just like I was, just like I am, just like you probably are in some way or some facet of your life. And it's like, that's the fun of it all. So I don't like getting into that argument with those gatekeepers because they say, you know, Greg Heffley is a mess. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. And that's the point. I do find it funny. You talk about people starting out wanting to teach kids.

I feel whenever there's a celebrity or an adult author who then comes into the children's book world, they always start with a moral. Right. Yeah. It really is like a lot of children's authors start with the question of what is the thing that I'm trying to teach. And kids can sniff that out. And there are certain kids who are going to be very receptive to that, but a lot of kids won't be. It's why my kids went straight from watching Barney to Phineas and Furb. There was no in between, right?

Because they watched Barney and they like the songs and everything. But then eventually they're like, I don't want to sing a song about crossing the street and looking both ways and things like that. I like this other thing that's a little bit more edgy. And we mentioned Greg gets humiliated a lot in these books. As you sketch them out, do you ever feel like, okay, I'm humiliating him too much? Great question. Yes. And that goes to the question of what's the lifespan of the property, right? Because, yeah, how many times can Greg get stuck in his underwear in a tree? It's not so funny after a while, right? So I try not to go too much through the ritual, you know, humiliations and degradations these days. But definitely it adds up. What do you see the role of parents being in these books?

adults in Greg's world are messy too. You know, in big shot, for example, Greg, he realizes that he's been lied to, right? When he was in kindergarten, he sat at the end of the bench on the soccer team, and his mother told him that the reason that he sat on the bench was because his coach was saving him as his secret weapon. Right. And so this, of course, is a short-term strategy by mom. to build up Greg's self-esteem. But now he's realizing that he was lied to.

And so adults are like that in these books, is that there aren't really any role models. Everybody's a little quirky in their ways. But I think that's fun. And I think that kids realize that over time that adults aren't always, you know, that they're a little bit of a mess too. Greg is unreliable and his parents are unreliable.

Exactly. If there's a moral that we're all unreliable narrators in our own way. I said this in the intro. I have my kids, I want to be funny dad. That's like my, you know, we all, I think, want to come out and make the kids laugh a little bit every day. And I'm somewhat successful at that. And then my kids read your books and they are just just kind of shaking with laughter in a way. I am not capable of. Do you have a theory on how you make kids laugh? I think by being a little bit subversive. I think the cartoons help, of course. But that's, you know, it's funny. My kids don't think I'm that funny either. Oh, good. Maybe I can only be funny on the page.

So we can only make strangers' children laugh. That's the lesson here. Now, I asked my son, who's a big fan of yours, if he wanted to record a question for you, Jeff, he said, yes, but can I go look for some food first? So he went and he found some food and then he recorded this question. Okay. My name is Alan Curtis.

I'm eight years old. And my question is, do you come up with your own ideas or get inspiration from somewhere else? That's a great question. Thank you for that question. I do come up with my own ideas. I hope to God that I've never stolen somebody's idea. You know, it's like one of those things where John Fogarty gets sued. because he, you know, he finds out he's ripping off a John Fogarty song.

I, you know, I really try to be original. I'm not really a knock-knock joke writer. I'm not a joke teller in that way. But I like to create stories that feel original to me. That being said, it's all been done before and somebody's always come up with it before you. And it just takes time to discover who did it first. Your kids are older now, but did you allow you? allow yourself to borrow from their lives at all?

A little bit. In fact, this book right here, Big Shot, is, it's a basketball book. And my kids live that AAU lifestyle. And, you know, my son, my younger son still is. So our, you know, every weekend, we're at tournaments, you know, watching all this stuff play out. And then what do we do for our entertainment? We watch the Celtics. all we do is watch basketball.

So I definitely borrowed from moments in my kids' lives for this book. I want to ask you, too, about this, Jeff, about sticking big ideas into a children's book. In Big Shot, Greg's mom says, you know, talks about how commercials on TV trick you into thinking certain things are healthy. An earlier book, Double Down, Greg's mom was going to turn him from a consumer into a creator. How does one stick ideas like that into the book without upsetting

the chronic universe you've created. You know, that's really funny, and I'm glad you're sort of calling me on that. In this book, in Big Shot, especially, I have a sequence where mom is trying to teach Greg about, you know, the tricks that big food companies use to addict people to foods and things like that. And I found that it really is funny.

You know, like Greg, there's kind of a chef boy R.D. equivalent. His name is Chef Marinera, where Greg really believes that this guy is real, and he really makes pasta by hand in old Italy. And in fact, he dresses up as Chef Marinera for his, you know, wax figure day at school. And his mom says, no, he's just a construct of, you know, these marketing companies. And in this stuff, this pasta is actually made in Detroit. And I was like, you know what? I feel a little bit weird about this because I'm really telling the truth about how these companies operate, but it also felt funny to me. So that's why I allowed myself to do that.

So if it's a lesson or a bigger point, but it can be cloaked in comedy, that's okay. Yes, as long as it's funny. You've been doing a bunch of events around the country over the last couple weeks. What is unique about a children's book signing? Oh, that's a great question. Well, first of all, there are children there. We've been doing a really different kind of event. Actually, my last four book tours have all been during the pandemic.

And so we're doing something really special, like a drive-through tour. When the pandemic started, I didn't want to be at the other end of a screen. I knew kids would be overloaded by that and, you know, by seeing their teachers on screens every single day. So I just wanted to do something physical. So I got out there with a van and a seven-foot grabber. I think it looked like a trident, but it had a grabber at the end of it. And I just handed books out that way. And it felt good to be doing something physical.

And now we've really amplified it. We just got back from Germany where we had a drive-through event with professional basketball players, professional cheerleaders, pirate techniques. You know, there was like an oversized goal where you hit a ball, a giant soccer ball with your car and score a goal against a goalie on stilts. So we've evolved with a form, and I feel really proud of that. The kids have any idea how old you are when they meet you? You know, my age was never, ever an issue until just recently. I've become 50, and now people seem to be talking about that more.

I think I, you know, I look reasonably youthful, but I've got these kind of of white streaks on the side of my head now. So I guess it's coming. You mentioned owning a bookstore, an unlikely story in Plainview, Massachusetts. My co-host on the show and I love bookstores, and I think that's probably the dream of ours. What's been the biggest surprise about owning a bookstore? It's been really super weird. I live in Plainville, Massachusetts, is a population of about 8,000. And the biggest authors in the world come through here. And it's really weird and cool. like Henry Winkler, I'd consider him a friend now. Wow.

Yeah, we've had Dave Pilky, who does Captain Underpants and Dogman, and Rick Ryarden, who does the Percy Jackson series, and lots of different people. And sometimes people would choose to come to our bookstore first, like Hillary Clinton, we've done an event with her, Chelsea Clinton, we've done three events with her, and, you know, up and down the line. So it's wild because we just stay in place.

We have about 300 events a year, and every day I can be enriched by just finding out who's coming to the store. Do you look at books in a different way since you've been involved in selling them? Yeah, I do. I am really interested in the idea of different voices being heard. I never have felt that my race has given me an advantage. None that I can really detect, but I've really learned that it certainly hasn't caused me any disadvantages. And especially with the George Floyd killings, like a lot of issues were really elevated. And one of them was about publishing, about the makeup of authors and the makeup of publishers.

And I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's something like 85% of the gatekeepers are white people. people. And that's going to cause a lot of people who are non-white to not have a seat at the table. I feel like that's changing now. We're certainly trying to do our part to make sure that different voices are heard. So, yeah, I definitely look at books and publishing differently now. I'll give you one more quote you gave to the New York Times way back when. Every good cartoonist knows when to turn the lights off. There's something creepy about a 60-year-old man writing books from the perspective of a 12-year-old. So you're 50. When do you turn the lights off? Yeah, that's like, you know, the Who saying, I hope I die before I get old. And then they're

doing the Super Bowl at like 75 singing those lyrics. You know, that kind of thing is just bound to trap me and, you know, be thrown in my face in 10 years. You know, my perspective on that is this, is that cartoons are different because we count on cartoons to be there, right? We don't think about Donald Duck or how old he should really be or whether or not he should be on his third marriage by now or saving, you know, putting money into his 401K. We just think of him as Donald Duck, right? He's there for us.

We don't even think about who created him, really. Those are the best kind of cartoon characters, the ones that outlive their creators. And I'm not saying Greg Heffley will outlive me. I think the voice is too specific to me. But especially these days when kids need some, something reliable. It's nice to know that a new diary of Wompea kid book is coming out in the fall. And so I think that that's really important. And so when I decide to turn off the lights,

I won't do it lightly. Jeff Kinney, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks so much. Your questions were great and thought-provoking. And, you know, much love to your kids. I really appreciate them being fans. Thanks again to Jeff Kinney. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Jonathan Kerma and Erica, A little housekeeping while you finish that post- Thanksgiving jog. I hope, hope, to have a very special guest for next week's Friday press box. A guess that literally needs no introduction. We've also got another classic books revisit coming in December.

I'll let you know on that shortly if you want to get reading. And of course, David Shoemaker and I are back Monday. Have a fantastic Thanksgiving media consumers. Get some rest. Catch up on your reading and go Cowboys. See ya.