Jeff Kinney | Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Partypooper

0:07Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Matthew, bringing you this week's episode with New York Times bestselling author Jeff Kinney. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Jeff Kinney joins us to talk about Party Pooper, the latest book from his global smash hit series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which has sold over 300 million copies. Jeff is a six-time Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award winner for favorite book and has been named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

0:54He spent his childhood in Washington, D.C. area and moved to New England, where he and his wife own a bookstore named An Unlikely Story. Now, here's Jeff Kinney, party pooper. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Excited to have you here today. Thanks for coming. I'm excited to be here in front of this big screen. Look at how big it is. It's just a huge screen. Okay, I thought that we would start with rapid-fire questions. Okay, let's do it. You ready? This is our warm-up, just to get everybody on the same page. Okay, great. Ice cream or cake? Oh, ice cream. Elevators or escalators? Escalators. Interesting.

1:34Reading or writing? Writing, for me. What's your favorite day of the week? Friday, of course. Friday. It's a good day. Maybe Thursday. It's like a bonus weekend day. It's leading you to the Friday. That's right. What do you think is the best age? The best age. Hmm. Fifth grade was the best for me. Yeah. So I'll tell you why later. Okay. Ooh. Okay. I'll take note of that. Pasta or pizza? I'm going to go with pizza. Yeah. A little less controversial than pasta perhaps. Yeah. Okay. And then a favorite kind of sandwich? Favorite kind. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with, I'm trying to be exciting here.

2:13I'm going to go with peanut butter and hot honey. Whoa. Peanut butter and hot honey. I'll answer that one too. I'm going to go with ice cream, ice cream sandwich. All right. Okay. I think that's a pretty good time. I wish I thought of that. You have more time to prepare. You can use that next time. Yeah, I was ready to go. I was ready to go. Well, we are so excited to have you here today. And as I was coming in, I was talking to a bunch of kids who are like, oh, my God, like you're the biggest celebrity. Just do incredible work here. So can you tell us, since there are so many kids here today, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

2:41Did you know you'd be doing this? Well, thank you for leading me right into the fifth grade question. Yes. When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Norton. She was probably in her 60s. She probably didn't have a lot of things in common with a boy in fifth grade. But what she noticed was I was trying to be funny. She noticed I was trying to be funny in class. I was trying to be funny putting on like a show, like a talent show kind of a thing. And she could tell I was trying to be funny, but she knew I wasn't good enough. And she gave me constructive criticism. She said, maybe you should try it like this.

3:15And one time we were rehearsing for a play and it was ridiculous. We were dressed in a giant snake costume, which is a whole thing. And she walks in the room. She said, there's a difference between laughing with and laughing at. And then she walked out of the room and she left me to think about that. And she was right. If we did this thing with the giant snake costume, people are going to laugh at us. And I needed to figure out a way to get people to laugh with us. Right. So I really needed to learn how to get better at comedy. And that's when I started to try to get better at comedy was in the fifth grade.

3:50Oh, wow. That is fascinating. So you talked about this early example of a teacher giving you some feedback, you know, what might work and what might not work. Tell us more about that. When you are writing something, how do you get input from other people? What does that look like? I don't often actually get a lot of feedback at all, believe it or not. I when I write a book, I keep it all to myself because I don't want to share it with anybody. Because what I really want to do is get a finished product. It's like sort of like baking cookies, right? You don't want to keep having people try it out as you're baking.

4:22You want them to enjoy the finished product. So I really keep it to myself. And then I put it out there. I share it with my wife, my editor, a few of my staffers. They tell me what they think of it. And believe it or not, I almost never get feedback from kids. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Because what I do is we go on a tour, both in the US and all over the world. And it's like a show. It's like we get up on stage, we do skits, funny things, and then we move on to the next city. And so I don't actually often get a chance to interact with kids, believe it or not. So after you've written this book, you probably feel really good about it.

5:01You're showing it to only a few people. Do you ever get feedback that hurts your feelings? Like, what do you do if someone doesn't like it? What does that sound like? It's funny because all authors would do this is that you would release a book and then you'd go online and see how people reacted to the book. And yeah, sometimes some of the feedback is negative. I've really learned not to read the feedback. I've really learned to just write the book, put it out in the world, and then let people chew over it, let people debate it. I don't try to get involved in the debate. I do my best as a creator, as an artist.

5:35I put my stuff out there and I hope that people enjoy it. Oh, I love that. You keep your sanity. I do. Yes, I think that's great. Yeah. You also mentioned that even starting when you were really young, you were trying to be funny. You're trying to figure out ways to be funny. And just one of your books has hundreds of jokes. The amount of jokes in a single book is crazy. Have you ever counted? No, but right now it's probably, well, I, yeah, it used to be, I think I would write 700 jokes per book. And now I write probably more like 2000 jokes per book. And that's crazy. Okay. So how do you do that?

6:07How do you now how do you just how do you know how to be funny? What does that sound like? It's funny. For me, it's a grind, right? So it's like a lot of output, which means a lot of typing. You saw that I was carrying around this like little miniature typewriter with me. That looked cool. It's called a free write. And it's not connected to the internet. So I'm not distracted by anything. And I just put out volume, which means if you're a kid listening right now, it's just like I put out a lot of stuff and a lot of it isn't very good, right? Most of the stuff I can't use, but every so often something peeks through and something works.

6:42And so if you're reading my next book in a few months, which is called Fight or Flight, there's going to be a section where Greg is keeping track of all the bullies, right? He knows what, where they all are. He knows their territories. And I wrote that just a few minutes ago in the other room. So I'm always writing. I'm always generating ideas. Yeah. That's how, that's how up to the, you know, it's like we were a part of the process. It is true. Yes, it is. We'll see ourselves in the book. It's true. So what do you do when you're not feeling funny? You have to keep writing even when you're not feeling funny.

7:16I just listened to an interview by somebody who worked for The Daily Show. And his point was, you need to know how to be funny, even if things aren't going well in your life. You know, I've been working on these books since 1998, and I've been published for about 20 years. And so a lot has happened in the world, a lot has happened in my life, right? And sad things, of course. My dog died last year, which was really sad. But I have to have this system that allows me to keep grinding away and then producing funny stuff no matter what, how I feel. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have any routine like when you're going to start writing or do you just write wherever you are, whenever it is?

7:58I'm in a routine right now where I put writing above everything else except for like I do some exercise. And then the first thing that I do is I start writing and I sit down in a room and I'll just start typing away like a madman for like three hours straight. And then what writing comedy is like, it's sort of like, let's say I had a dumbbell and I picked it up and I started to do bicep curls, right? Eventually your muscle is going to get tired and you can't keep doing it. So you have to know as a comedy writer when your muscle is going to get tired. And for me, it's about two and a half hours.

8:35The jokes start trickling out then. And I know it's time to quit for the day. I might come back to it, but usually about two and a half hours is as much as I can write comedy. Oh yeah. That's good to know for me, lifting weights, it's pretty quick. Five minutes or less and I'm like, I'm done with this. This is too much work. Absolutely. I mean, it sounds like a routine is very important to your process though. Yeah. And what's funny is that my, um, routine is something I'm 55 now. I think I have to ask my wife, um, but I think I'm 55 and I've only started to, to develop a routine only just now in my life.

9:11My father growing up, he had gone, he had been in the military and everything was routine for him. Like his watch, like he would wake me up at the same exact minute every single day. He'd say the same thing. His life was full of routine. Like he would iron his shirts the night before he'd put his juice in the car for his ride to work. He'd fill up the gas tank. And I realized that I really thrive on chaos, right? Non-routine. And so my whole life up to this point, I've been sort of living randomly. I go to bed at different times. I do strange things. And only recently, and then I've been successful with the book.

9:51So I figure this is the way to go. This is what makes me work. But the truth is, is that I've been missing the routine. I rejected the routine and I'm doing much better now. I'm much more efficient now that I have routines. And this year, when I came into this year, I said, I have to do something really tough this year. I have to write two screenplays, so two movies and two books, right? And I've never had the discipline to do something like that. And so I start now every day with meditation and yoga. I can't believe I'm saying this. And then exercise. And then I work and I've never worked so efficiently as right now.

10:29I love that. I love a routine. Like I'm more like your dad. I love a structure. I love a timeline. So that really speaks to my soul. That sounds amazing. I'm learning. So you talked about also writing screenplays, which has been so fun for us as consumers of the things you create. Tell us about that process. Is it really different than writing a book? Writing a screenplay is super fun. If any of you kids ever want to be creators, think about writing a screenplay, because when you're writing a screenplay, there's something about it that operates at the speed of thought, right? When I'm writing a book, it's really slow.

11:05It's like a total grind. It's really, really hard to squeeze out a page. But when you're writing dialogue for a screenplay, you're having the characters talk to each other and it just flies out of off of your fingers. And it's really, really exciting, especially knowing that these things that you write are going to be read by actors. You know, they're going to be said and acted out. And the power that you get from writing a screenplay. Let's say I start off a screenplay and I say a snowy neighborhood kids are playing and, you know, playing on in the snow, building snowmans, et cetera, snowmen, et cetera.

11:41and instantly I've just created a world that one day a bunch of animators, a lot of animators are going to have to put together and I've done it with just a sentence or two, you know, so that's really, really exciting. So I really like screenwriting more than anything. Yeah. I mean, it sounds amazing and so cool to get to see the process, like the ideas coming out of your head and then see it on the big screen when it's done must be incredibly cool. It's exciting. And it's really funny, like a secret of Hollywood is that when you're doing animation, everybody, all the actors are in like voice recording booths somewhere in the world, usually in Hollywood.

12:17So they're in a booth recording your lines. And then you could be anywhere. So one time I was, do you know who Ed Asner is? He was Carl in Up, right? Carl, the old man in the movie Up. and one for this movie Roger Krulls he was grandpa Greg's grandfather and I'll never forget like I wrote his lines and then I was in an airport and I was running to my plane with an earbud in my ear listening to Ed Asner read my lines and then if if I needed to make an adjustment I would type on my you know on my phone text the director who would tell Ed Asner how to read the new line or what the new line was. And then he'd say it just like that.

13:03And it was, it was instant. And it was just incredible. Incredibly cool. And also like, were you late for your flight? Like I made the flight. Yeah. The routine person in me is like, you should be sitting with snacks already. That sounds stressful, but, but that it's that chaos that kind of fuels your process. It's pretty cool. It did then. Now I arrive at the airport three hours early because I almost missed a flight to India. And that, that, that taught me something. Now, you know, yeah. Um, it's really cool. And And we'll talk more about the movies as well. But before we do that, let's go back to being a kid for a minute.

13:35I've heard you say that you were not the best student. You weren't the best athlete. So what would you say to kids that are maybe feeling like the wimpy kid in their class today? I never said I wasn't the best student or athlete. Those were your words. Oh, no. I mean, look at me, right? Oh, no. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I was, you know what? I was a smart kid, but I think I had attention issues. I still do. So like when a teacher was talking, I had to be drawing, right? Because that was the way I listen. And sometimes teachers would see me and they would think I wasn't paying attention. But that was how I paid attention.

14:11Yeah, I was a mediocre athlete. I would say I felt like sort of like an observer. Like I felt like an adult trapped in a kid's body, which is a weird thing to say. but I have one of my first jokes in Diary of a Wimpy Kid is that Greg says I you know one day I'll be rich and famous but for now I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons right and that's how I felt like as a kid and maybe that's a rude thing to say I could take that one back but that how I felt was that I wasn't a real person in this situation I was an adult trapped in the kid's body in a way and so it helped I think probably a lot of writers feel this way is that you feel like you're watching everything happen around you.

14:55You don't feel like you're actually an actor in that play. You're the narrator, maybe. Yes, exactly. So I, of course, then you're observing a lot. And then later on, when you're a grown up, you can write about it. Yeah, so cool. When I was a kid, I really struggled in school. And I particularly struggled with reading, like not a good reader. And, and books like these that incorporated illustrations and different ways of engaging with the text really helped me learn to love reading. It was a big change for me. Can you talk a little bit about how you decide where there should be drawings and where they should be worked into the stories?

15:27So usually in a book, an illustrated book for kids, the illustration reinforces the drawing, which means that somebody says there was a house on a hill with trees in front of it. And then you just see a picture of that very thing. I like to do things a little bit differently. I like for the picture to deliver the joke, right? So I like to walk the reader up to the joke, and then the picture actually delivers the joke. So if you took the pictures out of my book, the books wouldn't really make a lot of sense. So I like that better. That's the most sophisticated way to write. And sometimes the pictures subvert the joke, right?

16:05So that's a little bit harder to explain. But sometimes Greg will say something and then the picture will tell a little bit of a different story. And I think that's the really sweet spot for me as a writer. And I'll give you an idea of what like a subversion means. Right. So there's this thing called cognitive dissonance, which is a very grown up term. But it kind of causes you a little bit of confusion. And that confusion is what's the funny thing is. So, for example, in one of my first books, Greg Hefley, he does something bad. He's going to get in trouble for it. It's about the worms, if you guys know, in Rowley.

16:45And his mother says, Greg, I'm not going to ask you about what happened, but I need you to do the right thing. Right. And then Greg decides that the right thing to do is to let his friend Rowley take the fall for his crime. And for Greg, this makes sense because he's like, I did the right thing for me. And then there's this picture of Greg and his mom celebrating with an ice cream, right? Which is really, that causes a lot of dissonance because a kid is saying, no, no, this is wrong. But that's where the humor is. The joke is that Greg did the wrong thing, but he thinks he did the right thing.

17:22So that's what cognitive dissonance is. Yeah. And it is funny. I mean, that's a great example. Yeah, it's very funny. Talking about Greg's maybe like bad behavior, if we want to call it that, I had a question for you about that. I was wondering if Greg could invent his own holiday so that he could get a day off school. That's a good question. What holiday do you think he would choose? Oh boy, that's a really good question. I think I just wrote a joke about this, not just in the other room. But I was thinking that Greg in this next book is really tracking where the bullies are and how they move and when they show up for school.

17:58So whatever day all the bullies were in school, Greg wants to be out of school. I think I'd go with that. That's smart. A bully-free Friday. A holiday that we could all share. That's right. Not have to work or go to school. It sounds perfect. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. BFF, bully-free Friday. Smart. You can use that. Yeah. Do I owe you money? That's amazing. I love that. So you talked a little bit about this process of writing a screenplay versus writing a book. How has it been to see your work turned into movies? Did you always know that was going to happen? Yeah, at first it was really scary because the movie thing happened really fast.

18:37Like I wrote, now I'm 20 books in, right? But at that time, my second book had just come out. Oh, it was early. And so like Hollywood came calling and they wanted to buy, you know, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And I wasn't ready. I was scared. And then that happened really fast. And then I'll never forget sitting in the theater and the 20th Century Fox logo comes on and the trumpets blare. And I just felt nervous because I felt like this is really different. A book is really different than a movie. And at a movie, you pay money to sit in a seat and be entertained. Right. That's really different than a book.

19:14And I thought all these people in this theater paid money to be entertained. And so I hope we do the job. So it's a little scary. It is scary. And you did do the job. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a great movie. So, you know, you talked about being scared in that moment. And I feel like I talk to people a lot who are not able to take this next step, do the next action because they feel scared. It's like overwhelming. So what did you do in that scenario or others when you feel scared to still make yourself do that next step? So I did that next step very, very slowly. So I used to be a computer programmer.

19:47I worked as a medical software engineer and a game developer and some other things. And I didn't ever take a big leap to do Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I worked on it at night, right? So I kept my day job. And so I never took that big risk. A lot of artists tell a story about how they take a big risk, how they quit everything, and they chase their dream. Not me. I played it really safe, kept my day job. And even after Dyer of a Wimpy Kid came out and the following books came out, I kept my day job for 10 more years. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. And I only stopped because things at the job changed. They sold the company.

20:28But I really played it very, very safe. I didn't take a big risk. Wow. I mean, it's really interesting to hear about how this was kind of a creative outlet for you in the evenings or when you weren't working. Yeah. You know, what's funny about that is that at the time I was playing a lot of video games. I was in my 20s and there were a lot of video games. Adults, you'll remember Doom and Quake and games like that and these strategy games. And they took up a lot of my time. I really enjoyed it. But there's nothing that makes time go by faster than a video game. And I remember it would be all of a sudden one in the morning and I'm like, oh my gosh, I have to wake up at 630 to go to work and now I'm tired.

21:09But I love playing video games. But this one day I had this idea, which is that in life, generally speaking, you're either a consumer or a creator. You're either the chef making the food or you're the person enjoying the meal. Right. And I decided that I wanted to be a creator. And so I stopped. I stopped playing video games, which I'm sure a lot of kids won't like to hear. But that was what allowed me to have the time to be a creator. Right. Yeah. And then I got pulled back in in Fortnite about 10 years ago. So now you're back. Oh, thank goodness. That's good. But what an interesting shift to make there.

21:47Now, when you are not writing or doing work for the books, what is your creative outlet? Do you do something, anything else, anything new? or I it's come it my life has changed in a way is that the thing I like to do most is to work and I sort of work like I breathe it's kind of hard to explain but if I'm on vacation yes I'll go off and and and throw the frisbee with the kids but then when that's over then I actually just like to work I just it's like my way of being and I think that part of that is because I like doing what I'm doing. But part of it is really a privilege, right? Because I'm very lucky.

22:27A lot of writers work very hard to break in and I worked hard to break in too. And now that I've got my seat at the table, I realized it's such a privilege that whatever I write in that room over there is going to be read by millions of kids around the world. And so that's, I try to always honor that privilege. I try to never take my foot off the gas. I want to do my best possible job for those kids and honor their readership, really. So I take it seriously. Yeah. I mean, it is, from afar, it felt like you had the dream job. So that makes sense to me that it's just really fun to do this kind of work, even though sometimes it's a grind, as you said.

23:08Yeah, it is a grind, but it's, and it's not that fun to do the work, honestly. It's like hard and I'm on deadline. these days I'm drawing 16 hours a day, which is, does a number on you. Um, but it's, um, but like I said, but it's such a privilege that I, that I, um, you know, I, I always respect that. Yeah. Okay. So you're drawing a lot every day. It sounds like, tell us about your drawing process. Are you using paper and pencils? What does that look like? No, I, I, the reason I couldn't be a real cartoonist to begin with, I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist like Charles Schultz or Bill Watterson was that I couldn't really control like when once I put that pen onto the page it didn't exactly do what I had it in mind to do right so I couldn't I couldn't match that up so when the computers came along with the drawing tablets and things like that and you can zoom way in now I can actually make what's on the page or what's on the computer screen look like what's in my head so I use a computer I use a giant Wacom tablet and sometimes a small Wacom tablet it.

24:09And I do all my drawings in that way. That's really cool. And I can imagine it makes it easier for you to change them as you go. It does. Yeah. Sometimes like if I was, let's say sometimes I'm like, well, this character should just be bigger, right? So I can scale the character up, right? It's very easy to do. If I was doing pen and ink, pencil and paper, if that character was too small, I'd be like, that's okay. I'm just going to leave that character just like that. Because the idea of making a change that big would be very difficult. So the computer is a tool just like a word processor is a tool for writing.

24:42Yeah, absolutely. Do the drawings ever fuel the text or is it always text first, drawing second? It's always idea first. So I write, like I said, sometimes as many as 2 ,000 jokes in a book. And when I come up with those ideas, I have the idea in my head, right? So for example, I came up with an idea today that all the bullies, basically all the weaker kids, the targets of the bullies create this bully alert system where they make bird noises, right? And the bird noise is like, tell the other weakling kids kind of that the bully is coming, right? Smart. It feels like we could use that. It does, I think.