Growing up is hard enough, but being a middle child can make it all the more difficult. Elder siblings tend to pick on you, while the younger ones can get away with anything. No one knows it better than author Jeff Kinney, whose words-and-cartoons exploration of the trials of a middle school misfit, written in the form of a journal, has been a colossal success.
Drawing from life
Born in Maryland in the United States, Kinney was caught between four siblings – elder brother Rodrick, his sister, and his younger brother, Patrick. Needless to say, multiple scuffles and fights were an unavoidable part of his childhood. Later, drawing on to these memories helped him create the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.
But did you know Kinney didn’t grow up wanting to be a children’s author? In fact, his dream was to become a newspaper cartoonist, but he wasn’t able to get his comic strips published. So, he spent eight years writing the first book in the series.
Right from childhood, Kinney loved to draw, but he wasn’t very good at it. So he developed his own drawing style – with stick figures and bug-eyed characters. Using his surroundings as an inspiration, he created comics strips about the life around him. One such comic strip was Igdoof, which Kinney ran in his college newspaper at the University of Maryland. However, his work looked too juvenile and so he never received any efforts from big newspapers.
A love for computers
Besides drawing, Kinney was equally fond of computers. When his parents bought their first computer, Kinney was so interested in it that he even learned to write his own computer programmes. It was hard for his parents to keep him away from his new hobby. His computer skills helped him land a job after college.
Kinney started working as a content creator for a children’s website. After receiving multiple rejection letters for his comic strip, Kinney published his first book online in daily installments on funbrain.com, which offers free educational games for kids. Within a year, he had 12 million readers. To date, the online version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid has more than 80 million visits, and is typically read by more than 70,000 kids a day.
He continues to pioneer new Internet content as the full-time design director of Poptropica, which he helped set up in 2007. The website uses educational games to create a love for reading among children.
An author’s dream
In the Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Wrecking Ball, the Heffleys embark on major home improvements thanks to a surprise windfall. Kinney, who recently opened a bookstore in Massachusetts, draws from his own experience to regale us with a humorous tale of a family tackling renovations and all the problems that come with it from rotten wood and toxic mould to sinister creatures. As a child, Kinney spent a lot of time in bookshops. That’s why they hold a special place in his heart. When the local bookshop in his hometown went out of business, Kinney felt a sense of irreparable loss. So now years later, after establishing himself as a successful author, he decided to open a bookshop in his adopted hometown of Plainville, Massachusetts. He called it ‘An Unlikely Story’.
Picture Credit : Google