Author of 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid', Jeff Kinney talks about going from rejection to success

Standing in a book store, around 10 years ago, with a copy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid in my hands, I wondered ‘what is this?’ I knew I was past the target age group, but I bought it anyway because the book title drew me to it. Well, that’s what Jeff Kinney was going for when he wrote this ‘novel in cartoons’; he wanted to make it interesting, to make the reader laugh.

Introduced to the world of comics—Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and more—by his dad, Kinney decided to create his own cartoon character called ‘Igdoof’, in college. But it was only in 1998, when Kinney started writing Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Before that, he tried—for three years—to get his cartoons syndicated with newspapers, but when that proved unsuccessful, he decided “to start writing this book as Greg Heffley, a middle-school kid”. Eight years later, he finally showed it to an editor, and it was published in 2007. He was recently in Mumbai for the Penguin Annual Lecture 2016! by Penguin Random House India in association with Landmark.

If you laughed at how Greg Heffley was tricked by his older brother Rodrick, into believing that he slept through the summer holidays, but woke up in time for the first day of school, you might find it interesting to know that Kinney’s older brother Scott pulled the same trick on the author. So, a lot of the ideas for the book are based on real life, which he then puts through a fiction blender. “I started filling up a sketch book with all my ideas, jokes and funny incidents that happened to me as a kid. I thought I would be done filling up the sketch book in a month, but it took me four months to only fill the last page, and four years to fill the whole sketch book,” shares the award-winning author of two Children’s Choice Book Awards and six Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards for Favorite Book.

“I don’t think I will start another series of books”. While Kinney cannot say for sure how many Wimpy Kid books there will be, he does plan to keep writing. There’s “another movie that’s scheduled to be released next year, then hopefully two more after that, and we’re also working on a musical. I’m also working on an animated television special,” says Kinney, whose favourite character from the series is Rowley Jefferson (Greg’s best friend), because Rowley likes being a kid and isn’t in any rush to grow up. And Kinney believes that “the best cartoon characters stay the same age forever.”

While Kinney started writing when he was 28, a lot closer to his younger self than he is now, when he could easily connect to his characters, he believes that Greg’s faults are typical human faults.

When it comes to choices, a pre-teen like like Greg realises that he doesn’t have too many choices —that teenagers’ lives are really determined by adults, and it’s only when you become a teenager that you get this freedom to set the course of your life the way you’d like it to be, but Greg, of course, will never quite get there. “I think it’s really important to let our teens have and make choices and as it’s good as parents to really guide them and help them make the right ones”. 

Talking about his favourite authors, he says, “I really liked Judy Blume as a kid, Carl Barks who’s a cartoonist, Tolkein and C.S Lewis”. For those who aspire to be writers, Kinney’s advice is to read. “The more you read, the better a writer you’ll be. And then, the best thing is to find a good mentor. You don’t want to show your books, or your writing to your parents or people who are really going to just praise you. You need to find people who are qualified and willing to give good criticism”.