Jeff Kinney | Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Partypooper

SPEAKER_1 (0:08)

Welcome 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/talks at Google. Jeff Kinney joins us to talk about Partypooper, 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. He spent his childhood in Washington, DC area and moved to New England, where he and his wife own a bookstore named An Unlikely Story.

Now, here's Jeff Kinney, Partypooper.

Jeff Kinney (1:10)

Hello, everyone.

SPEAKER_3 (1:12)

Welcome. Excited to have you here today. Thanks for coming.

Jeff Kinney (1:14)

I'm excited to be here in front of this big screen.

SPEAKER_3 (1:16)

Look at how big it is. It's just a huge screen. Okay. I thought that we would start with rapid fire questions.

Jeff Kinney (1:22)

Okay, let's do it.

SPEAKER_3 (1:23)

This is our warm up, just to get everybody on the same page. Okay, great. Ice cream or cake?

Jeff Kinney (1:28)

Oh, ice cream.

SPEAKER_3 (1:30)

Elevators or escalators?

Jeff Kinney (1:32)

Escalators.

SPEAKER_3 (1:33)

Interesting. Reading or writing?

Jeff Kinney (1:36)

Writing. For me.

SPEAKER_3 (1:38)

What's your favorite day of the week?

Jeff Kinney (1:41)

Friday, of course.

SPEAKER_3 (1:42)

Friday. It's a good day.

Jeff Kinney (1:43)

Maybe Thursday. It's like a bonus weekend day.

SPEAKER_3 (1:45)

It's leading you to the Friday. That's right. What do you think is the best age?

Jeff Kinney (1:50)

The best age.

Fifth grade was the best for me. Yeah. So I'll tell you why later.

SPEAKER_3 (1:55)

Okay. Ooh, okay. I'll take a note of that. Pasta or pizza?

Jeff Kinney (2:00)

I'm going to go with pizza.

SPEAKER_3 (2:01)

Yeah. A little less controversial than pasta perhaps. Yeah. Okay. And then a favorite kind of sandwich?

Jeff Kinney (2:07)

Favorite kind. I'm going to go with... I'm going to go with... I'm trying to be exciting here. I'm going to go with peanut butter and hot honey.

Whoa.

SPEAKER_3 (2:16)

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... I wish I thought of that. You had 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 were 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? Did you know you'd be doing this?

Jeff Kinney (2:42)

Well, thank you for leading me right into the fifth grade question.

When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Norton. She was probably in her sixties. 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 like this. And 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.

SPEAKER_3 (3:50)

Oh, 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?