The spooky place star author wrote new Wimpy Kid book
Forced out of home because the whole family was there “24 hours a day, seven days a week”, Jeff Kinney found an interesting place to spend his days drawing and writing the latest installment of the series that has sold more than 250 million copies.
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Jeff Kinney’s wildly popular Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series is often credited with sparking a love of books in young readers, but the best-selling American author continues to be worried by the declining rates of reading.
When Saturay Extra spoke with Kinney, he was sitting inside his car at a cemetery in his hometown of Plainville, Massachusettes. Having been forced out of his home to work because the rest of the family are all there “24 hours a day, seven days a week” during the continuing COVID-19 restirctions, Kinney found the cemetery was a great, quiet place to write.
“Hopefully you can’t tell when you read the book,” he jokes.
The eerie location is also where he penned a lot of his new book Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: The Deep End, which hits shelves on Tuesday and marks the 15th in the series that has sold more than 250 million copies. The books have also spawned four movies that have grossed more than $US260 million at the box office.
Kinney, 49, is a long-time champion of childhood reading and while he’s been in the industry and around children and young readers for decades, he is still shocked when he hears about literacy rates moving in the wrong direction.
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It was revealed this week in The Daily Telegraph that more than 1000 HSC students would need the exam to be read to them, according to NSW Education Standards data. The number of students found to have a “low reading ability, as demonstrated on an accepted reading test” jumped from 595 to 1167 last year.
In the US, a 2013 study by the National Assessment of Education Progress found that almost 70 per cent of children in fourth grade were “below proficient” in their ability, meaning they were reading at a level below their grade.
“It does feel like our populations should be getting more literate not less literate,” Kinney says.
“I’m surprised but I also think the way that kids communicate with one another and absorb information now is so fundamentally different than it was when I was growing up, it does seem like there’s been some sort of tectonic shift in the way that kids read. From my point of view, I’ve had good luck and fortune in getting kids to read but I’m always surprised to hear when literacy rates are dropping.”
Kinney believes allowing kids to read a range of different types of texts, from graphic novels to magazines and even listening to audio books, is key to helping them develop an appreciation for reading.
His Wimpy Kid stories,. starring hapless middle schooler Greg Heffley, are often cited as ‘gateway’ books — ones that he describes himself as the perfect “transition from picture book to chapter book” — and loves that they can open the door to more advanced reading.
“I think that if a kid reads a book of any stripe and reads it through and closes the cover then they have a feeling of success and satisfaction and they often look for another book to replicate that or to further that,” he says. “I’m always happy, as a citizen but also as a book seller, when kids become engaged in books.”
While devices of all shapes and sizes can be a barrier to some kids picking up a traditional book and reading cover to cover, Kinney is bouyed by the fact there is a much greater range for kids than there was when he was growing up.
“My memory of my childhood, I remember Judy Bloom and Beverly Cleary books being the only ones that really called out to me at a young age,” he says. “It does feel like there’s a much wider selection now and it feels like in the past even five years there’s a much better opportunity for kids to read books that are written from a perspective that’s a different perspective.”
It’s clear Kinney takes his responsibilty in children’s literacy seriously. After the overwhelming success of his books, he could quite easily settle back and enjoy the money that continues to roll in. But even during the height of the pandemic, he was out touring — in a creative, socially-distanced manner — and making sure kids were getting their hands on his books. He travelled up and down the US East Coast in a van and handed out books to kids using a “trident — which was really just a seven-foot grabber,” he laughs. But it was important to him to get out there and continue to promote reading.
“We found that when we did that van tour, even though I was just handing kids a book on a stick basically, the parents were so grateful for having something to look forward so now we’re going to amplify that experience and so something a little more fun.
Having two teenaged sons, aged 15 and 17, the author knows only too well the draw of things like computer games on young minds and despite being such an advocate for reading, he isn’t immune to the challenges parents face across the globe with getting their kids away from a screen and into a book.
“They are like most kids,” he told the BBC in 2018, “You have to prod them to read. We are victorious if they spend less than five hours a day on screens at the weekend.”
His two boys definitely read his Wimpy Kid books growing up — and still do — but if they were asked to declare their favourite author, he admits with a laugh things might get awkward.
“They read them and enjoyed them and my 17-year-old is reading the latest book now so I’ve still kind of got him, but they weren’t super fans,” he says. “Both of my kids liked another author better — my younger son liked Big Nate and my older son liked the Rick Riordan Percy Jackson series, which was just fine with me. They enjoyed my books but not too much.”
Kinney thinks kids have suffered greatly during the lockdowns that have been rolled out across the world and hopes his new book will provide some relief to those who have been looking forward to the next installment of Heffley’s life and those of his best friend Rowley and annoying brothers Roderick and Manny.
“We came up with a tag line for the book over here which is ‘Finally something fun’ — I really like that idea and how relevant it is,” he says.
The Wimpy Kid series has spent the past 605 weeks on the The New York Times’ best-selling children’s series list. The franchise has generated more than half a billion dollars in revenue and a new release remains a huge highlight for many kids in many countries.
But for all that success, Kinney still has a fear in the back of his head that it could all end as quickly as it started.
“I write these books and I’m very lucky to have had success with the books and I’m always afraid that’s going to go away and one day it will, just because of the way things become popular and eventually...well, I don’t want to say those words. I’ll say I know it’s not forever, let’s just say it like that,” he laughs.
* Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Deep End, Penguin, available Tuesday