Host with the Most: an interview with Jeff Kinney
Wimpy Kid creator Jeff Kinney visited the UK in the summer to promote his latest book with a game show tour. Will it be a hit? It’s a no brainer, Damian Kelleher discovers.
Jeff Kinney is in a car speeding from the Hay Festival towards Salford when I catch up with him on the phone. He’s going to be appearing on Blue Peter later that day, he’s already done one event at the festival, and is heading back for another sell-out the following day. As we speak, Jeff tells me he’s just driving past Raglan Castle. ‘I came here about 30 years ago, and I’d love to stop, but we have no time.’ No doubt about it, Jeff Kinney is a busy guy.
Jeff is over from the States promoting the 18th book in the phenomenally-successful Diary of A Wimpy Kid series – and that’s not counting all the spin-off titles in Greg Heffley’s Wimpy World. The cover of the new book No Brainer is emblazoned with the words OVER 275 MILLION BOOKS SOLD and I ask Jeff if he has any idea what 275 million books would look like in real life.
‘We’re getting close to 300 million books. We’re at 295 million right now and we’ve actually done some of those calculations and I think it’s about one and a half times around the Earth and seven times the size of Mount Everest, and it’s crazy. So yes, we do know what it actually looks like!’
Would Greg Heffley be able to work that kind of comparison out for himself, I wonder.
‘No, not without a calculator,’ Jeff assures me.
The plot of No Brainer book has taken something of a departure from Jeff Kinney’s usual Wimpy Kid storyline. Yes, there is always something crazy going on in Middle School when Greg Heffley is around, but this time things are taken in a whole new direction. When Greg’s Middle School begins to fail – their scores are so bad, it even makes the news – the principal, Mrs Mancy, gets the sack, and ex-head Principal Bottoms is reluctantly dragged from retirement to shake things up.
‘This is the first book I’ve written that is a straight farce,’ explains Jeff. ‘I’ve never written a book previously that was so firmly in the satire camp. It was interesting to work it this way. It’s a little out of line there with the rest of the books but I thought it would be good to lampoon the education system and the challenges that schools face right now.’
Faced with a severe lack of funds, Principal Bottoms introduces all kinds of ‘interesting’ ideas to cut budgets and eventually boost the school’s ever-dwindling coffers. One of his ideas is to introduce a High Flyers Club that allows high-attaining students special privileges which then evolves into the Platinum High Flyers Club (‘you don’t have to get grades to be a member, Greg tells us, ‘You just need to be willing to fork out $12.99 a month).
Money and the investment in education are at the heart of this book it would seem, and Jeff agrees.
‘Yes, it is. I think everybody can relate to these budget cuts and the ways we have to debase ourselves to make ends meet. You know, one of the things I’m also striving to do is make the books feel true – true to somebody’s experience – so I think that’s why this book has struck a nerve.’
Never underestimate the power of comic fiction, I suggest. ‘I don’t know why cartoons are so powerful in that regard,’ Jeff agrees, ‘but it’s fun to use it as a satirical weapon when it’s appropriate to do so.’
Investing in literacy is an investment in the future and to that ends Jeff Kinney has turned his attentions to a new campaign called Libraries for Primaries. The idea is to ensure that every UK primary school has a dedicated library space.
‘I was just at a school in Wales where the National Literacy Trust has installed a library in partnership with my publisher Puffin,’ Jeff explains. ‘It’s great to see this brand new shiny library with a great diverse range of books. What we really need to be thinking about is that if we don’t get this generation to fall in love with reading then bookstores will go away, and libraries will vanish. It’s really important to make that investment for our kids.’
If the idea of building a school without a library seems a little strange, Jeff would definitely agree. ‘Yes of course and I grew up with schools with libraries, but it’s not the case everywhere. In Los Angeles, California for example, there is no budget for school libraries. The schools have to cobble them together out of donations and that’s just unacceptable.’
If No Brainer takes a satirical look into the future of education, it would seem that fiction can be strangely prescient. I tell Jeff how much I enjoyed the new robot janitor that Principal Bottoms employs to save money. Was this a comment from the author on the current Artificial Intelligence debate that is raging right now within the creative industries on both sides of the Atlantic?
‘What’s funny is that when I was writing the book I came up with this robot janitor and thought it would be funny to have him replace staff members,’ says Jeff, ‘an anthropomorphic machine taking the place of humans. And then after I put the book to bed, I realised it could be read as a commentary on AI and of course, everybody is worried about their jobs because of AI which is extremely disruptive. But then something very strange happened.’
In No Brainer, there is an episode in the book in which the school introduces a rule that if one parent complains about a book, it has to be removed from the library. The most popular books in the school are the Commando Crocodile series, and sure enough, a parent complains that the crocodile protagonist is not wearing any pants. So the librarian comes up with a compromise to keep the books in the library – she draws pants onto Commando Crocodile!
‘I thought this was maybe too farcical,’ says Jeff, ‘where the librarian began drawing pants on all the animal illustrations in the schoolbooks. But that’s literally happening right now in the United States! In fact Publishers Weekly have just done a story about how librarians are drawing black pairs of pants onto human characters. I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it.’
While Jeff is over in the UK, he’s taking his No Brainer Show to schools and festivals. If you think that sounds a little bit like a game show, you’d be absolutely right. ‘It’s actually seven games shows in one show and it’s really fun,’ Jeff explains. ‘I think everybody would love to be on a game show on television so we’re creating that experience for kids, for teachers, for parents, for librarians to compete for money that goes direct to their library. So we’ve just left a school in Wales where the winning librarian was rewarded with $1500 dollars for her library.’
Like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books themselves, Jeff’s stage show is a high concept creative fun fest where everyone has a great time – and that includes the librarians. ‘We have a game called Who Wants to be a Rock Star Librarian so it’s sort of like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire where we put them on the spot and they have to answer a series of questions and if they get them all right they get to win the whole prize. It’s been fun. So far we’ve given away $120,000 to libraries in the US, Germany, India and the UK.’
There’s a serious side to all these madcap capers as Jeff is willing to admit. It’s all about getting kids to discover the joys of reading for pleasure, and reading by themselves, so that they can become committed readers with all the benefits that entails. But encouraging children to read doesn’t need to be an uphill struggle if the whole experience is guaranteed to make you laugh from book to book.
‘I think that kids need these ‘in-between’ books like mine. We start off reading to kids from these lush picture books and then we expect them to go right from that to serious reading with books full of text. There needs to be something in between and that’s where graphic novels and books like mine fit in and bridge the gap by turning kids into lifelong readers. What we want to do is enforce this feeling of success in our kids. If a kid finishes a book and closes the last page they’re going to feel like they’ve achieved something and they’re going to read another. So we’ve really got to feed our kids’ interests, making sure they’re reading what they want to read so they’ll keep on reaching for the next book.’
Damian Kelleher is a writer and journalist specialising in children’s books.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: No Brainer, Jeff Kinney, 978-0241583135, £14.99 hbk.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess, Jeff Kinney, 978-0241583166, £14.99 hbk.