The Interviews

James Patterson Talks to Jeff Kinney
September 17th, 2008


Jeff Kinney: Hi!

James Patterson: How are you?

JK: Great. First of all, let me say thank you for contacting me. It is a huge honor to hear from you. Your books got me through many a long commute through the winter of ‘95.

JP: My ten-year-old, Jack, and I read Diary of a Wimpy Kid this summer.

JK: That’s great.

JP: Part of what got me into this is this whole notion of getting kids reading is a conviction that the best way is to give them books that they read and say “that was great.” Also, that it’s a sort of duty of the parents’ to go out and find those books for the kids. They don’t really think of it that way, you know?

JK: Absolutely. I read a quote by you recently saying that the JP brand is books that people just gobble up. I like that philosophy: trying to create something that is worth devouring. I aspire to that same thing.

JP: What I did with Jack the past three summers was that I would go out and get him a bunch of books that I thought would turn him on. The first summer came the “do I have to?” The second summer he said, “you know, okay,” and this summer, he says, “sure.” And he read eleven books this summer, he’s ten. Diary of a Wimpy Kid was one of them, which he loved. And the other thing is, read the books and then talk about them the way parents are used to talking to kids about movies. So when are you quitting your day job?

JK: You know, I love my day job, this is really a hard one for me. We create virtual worlds for kids and we’re publishing to kids online, which is actually how Diary of a Wimpy Kid got started. So I love the idea that we can bring other authors’ works to all these millions of kids that we have. So it’s tense, but it’s fun.

JP: Diary of a Wimpy Kid started online?

JK: Yeah, and it’s interesting because I didn’t actually intend it to be for kids. I wrote it as a book for adults. I’ve had my eyes on it since then, but we released it a few years ago, in 2004, and I had mixed feelings about putting it onto a kid’s site. To date we’ve had about 60 million readers online and that really helped with the print success.

JP: That’ll do it. In terms of your boys, any favorite books that they have?

JK: Yeah. My sons love the Captain Raptor books. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them.

JP: I have.

JK: They’re the graphic novels. My older son Will loves the Geronimo Stilton series. And also, I’m a little embarrassed to say, but the Pokemon series, they’re really well written. And then of course, there’s the Dr. Seuss classics.

JP: Do you remember any of the books that stuck out when they were younger? Or when reading to your three year old now?

JK: I’m sure the Dr. Seuss books have always worked really well, though that’s not a surprise to hear. Shel Silverstein’s poems work, because they are somewhat audacious and always surprise kids.

JP: Kids like to laugh. I wish that more teachers would think about that.

JK: Right, exactly. And I think they respond more to things that don’t have the obvious message, where the adult’s hand isn’t so evident. That’s why I like the Judy Blume books, because the kids behaved badly. It’s most important to get kids to feel that it’s authentic.

JP: For starters, I think it’s so important that they read a book and think, that was a cool book.

JK: Right, those are the best notes I’ve gotten. I’m sure you’ve gotten some like this regarding your newest, The Dangerous Days of Daniel X, which kicked mine off the best seller list, thank you very much.

JP: I don’t know if it kicked it off… maybe kicked it off of number one.

JK: But the best notes that you get are when parents say their kids have never read a book before, and this is the first one that they’ve read, and that’s just great, it makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing.

JP: Now you’ve got a new book coming out for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a do-it-yourself book, where you’re encouraging kids to get involved and try to write these kinds of cartoons and stories. Would you like to say a bit about the contest or any of that project?

JK: Oh sure. This idea started off as a blank journal. Then it turned into this really strange hybrid book. The closest thing it comes to, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen My Book About Me, by Dr. Seuss, where kids can fill in the blanks. This is sort of a grown up version of that, where there are prompts for writing-in and creating comics, and then there’s a full color section in the middle of comics.

JP: I read it this weekend, it is cool. I’m sure a ton of kids are going to do it. It’ll be interesting to see which one of the kids wins the contest. Are you going to put that in one of the books, the contest winner?

JK: Yeah, we just put up wimpykid.com/contests, where kids are encouraged to submit their own comics. It’ll be interesting to see what kids come up with. My favorite type of comic is a comic written by a kid, because they aren’t constrained by all the rules.

JP: Right, they don’t know “the rules.”

JK: So their stuff ends up much funnier. I just can’t wait to see these.

JP: Have you any sort of tips, things you’ve come across that might be helpful for people in terms of getting their kids reading?

JK: I think the selection is the first thing; you really have to be smart about what you pick to begin with. My kids aren’t of reading age yet, but I can sense the challenge coming. They aren’t used to it—kids have a visual literacy that is unlike what kids had twenty or thirty years ago. They bring an added expectation to reading, which comes, I think, from the internet.

JP: Clearly any action to engage them in reading isn’t working right now, because so many kids just aren’t turning on. I always think it would be good if they could teach movies in school because kids want to talk about plot and character development. But if we started with Ingmar Bergman movies, everybody would say, well, I hate movies.

JK: When I was in school we had a free period where we were allowed to read anything we wanted, which turned out to be a slight disaster…that was when this totally tasteless reading series came out, so we had half the class reading these awful dirty joke books. But I liked the spirit of it, where you can read whatever you want, as long as it’s reading. I have mixed feelings about graphic novels myself, but I think there’s a lot of reading happening because of them, and you can really engage a kid with a graphic novel.

JP: Wimpy Kid, though obviously not a graphic novel, it is this very unique combination of pictures and words. Which works great. On parents’ taking on this responsibility—a good friend of mine, who raised two boys who are now in their twenties, told me something interesting. He’s a good father, but it dawned on him, “I never thought of this as something I should have done. How dumb of me, of course I should have done that.”

JK: I told my son recently, Will, that I’ll never say no to a book. If he wants a book, I’ll never say no to that. And I hope that that will be the start of a love affair with books.

JP: Well it’s definitely worked with Jack. Because it’s gone from “yeah...” to “sure.”

JK: I don’t know what made me a reader when I was a kid. I think we had those progress charts where you had to read a certain number of books in school. I really did latch on to the Judy Blume books and the Beverly Cleary books, and I jumped right up to the Piers Anthony books, the magic series, and then inevitably the Lord of the Rings series. But for me, I’m almost embarrassed to say, the bathroom was my reading zone. We had stacks of books in there. My favorite reading of all time has been the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge cartoons of Carl Barks from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s.

JP: The old comics? For whatever bizarre reason, I loved those too. There was something about Scrooge in that money bin…

JK: You know what it was, was good story telling. My point of reference for geography these days comes from those books. When I think of Asia or the Incans, I always have that point of reference. Nobody ever presented it to me as, “here’s a learning experience.” I was allowed to discover it. And I enjoyed it on its merits. I think the other thing that’s going to make it hard for parents to compete is with video games. That’s sort of an obvious one, except for the fact that there’s really good storytelling in video games now. So kids are getting to go beyond the storytelling with books and instead be a part of the story. So if you hate video games, then you’ve got quite a big challenge on your hands.

JP: Well the one thing with books is that it’s one place where they can really go for diversity of experience and opinion. Which less and less is available on television and in the movies, or in video games or in graphic novels. There’s a whole lot of ways to look at the world, and at this stage, books are the best place to find out how other people think.

JK: Right. I agree, fully.

JP: Okay. This is cool, I really enjoyed it. Jack and I look forward to The Last Straw, which is coming out early next year, right?

JK: It will. Thank you very much.

JP: We’ll be there at the bookstore, first day.

JK: It really was a huge honor. Thanks for talking!

JP: Alright, bye-bye.