Diary of a Wimpy Terp

IN MY DEFENSE, my family always used cuticle scissors when I was growing up. For the uninitiated, they’re the miniature scissors with a gentle curve in the blade, perfect for cutting fingernails or, yes, toenails. Cuticle scissors were in every medicine cabinet of every bathroom of our family home.

Nail clippers, on the other hand, baffled me—clearly overengineered for a task that could be performed handily by my reliable cuticle scissors. And besides, every time I had occasion to use nail clippers, I just couldn’t get them to work.

Last year, I found myself in Australia, and I knew I couldn’t make it through a 10-day trip without trimming my toenails. The hotel gift shop’s only option was those infernal nail clippers.

Back in my hotel room, I opened the packaging and steeled myself for the challenge. I positioned a toenail between the curved ends of the nail clipper, squeezed the ends together, and ... nothing. Not even a dent.

But then I thought, what if I’m doing this wrong? And so, deeply aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, I typed the following in my phone’s search box, “How do you use nail clippers?”

The search results came back instantly. I clicked “play” on the YouTube video, and to my incredulous surprise, I discovered that nail clippers have a lever that rotates outward and, when depressed, creates considerable force—enough to cut through, say, the nail on a big toe.

At that moment, I leveled up as a human. I made short work of my toenails, marveling at the feat of engineering I held in my hand. I was 54 years old.

Why, given the chance to write a cover story for my alma mater’s alumni magazine, would I tell such an embarrassing “I was today years old”-flavored story? Is it to ensure that I’ll never be able to run for higher office?

My aim in starting out this way is to illustrate the fact that I haven’t got it all figured out. Yes, I’ve had some success in my professional life, but my everyday one is filled with failures, dotted with the occasional small triumph. In many ways, I’m just beginning my journey into a more grown-up world.

Some of you might have started reading this piece hoping for sage words of wisdom. You’ve come to the wrong place for that. This essay is written by a children’s author who succeeded despite himself.

But if there’s something you can learn from my failings and shortcomings, that would really be something. And while you’re reading, I’ll be trimming my nails. They’ve gotten a little out of control.

I KNOW HOW THESE THINGS are supposed to go. When I open my freshly delivered copy of Terp magazine in my kitchen, I’m greeted with articles about extraordinary people whose stories of success are inspiring and motivating.

A central thread of most of these stories is how an individual’s time spent at the University of Maryland helped chart their path forward. And while my time at Maryland did indeed play an instrumental role in putting me on the road I’m on now, it would be a stretch to connect those dots too meaningfully.

And so, when I was approached with a request to share life lessons I’ve learned, I had to be candid with the magazine’s editors before agreeing to take the assignment. The truth is, as an undergraduate at Maryland, I was a bit of a mess. In fact, I was the absolute worst.

This confession seemed to be music to one editor’s ears. “Write about that! People will want to hear it.” And so, buoyed by this perhaps terrible advice, I’ll embark on my story, warts and all.

I started off in Bel Air Hall, then an all-guys honors residence on North Campus, living among quirky, bright 18- and 19-year olds. Rumor has it that one of the guys living on the floor above me went on to co-found Google. It was that kind of place.

WHEN MY SON ACCEPTED his offer to become a Terp, I said this: Maryland is too big. You have to make it small for yourself, or you’ll get lost.

I knew of what I spoke. When I got to Maryland as a second-year transfer student, I struggled to find my moorings, to find my people. But I had a breakthrough in my third semester on campus.

In the college where I’d started off, I had a cartoon in the paper. It was a weekly, and I’m not sure there was any barrier to entry. If you wrote it, they’d print it.

The Diamondback was a different beast entirely. It had a daily circulation of 30,000, with just three coveted cartooning spots. I tried to break in a few times, but didn’t have any luck.

Then, a miracle. I’ll never forget the day when, while living in a six-person suite in Leonardtown, I got The Call. It was the editor of The Diamondback. One of the cartoonists had dropped out. The slot was mine, if I wanted it.

From that day forward, everything for me got better, and also worse. I suddenly had the attention of every kid who picked up their free copy of The Diamondback—yes, print copies were a thing back then, and phones weren’t yet—but my academic career was effectively on hold, if not finished.

Every night, I made a calculation. Should I work on this homework assignment, which will be seen by one professor, or this comic, which will be seen by upwards of 30,000 students? More often than not, I shot for the bigger audience.

My report card suffered, but my skills as a humorist grew. Every day I’d try to wake up in time to get to the dining hall before lunch ended, to watch kids reading the comic I’d turned in the night before. Sometimes they’d chuckle. Sometimes they’d turn the page, a blank look on their faces. I registered it all.

A nontrivial side benefit of having a comic in The Diamondback was making daily visits to the newsroom and getting to know the staffers. They were all there to do the same thing as me: to cut their teeth, to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and to develop their skills in front of a sizable audience. This special group of people had managed to pull off quite a trick—to shrink a campus of 1,300 acres down to the size of a newsroom.

Some of those journalists went on to do something even more remarkable—to make the world smaller, more knowable to an audience of news readers. I feel grateful for getting to share that pizza box-littered office in South Campus with them. The work they’re doing now is more important than ever.

I MAY NOT HAVE left behind a stellar academic record during my time at the university, but I definitely left my mark. Just not in the way I expected to.

During my last semester, I self-published a compilation of my comics in The Diamondback, “The Igdoof Bathroom Companion.” I even had a well-attended book signing at the Stamp Student Union, which constituted a high-water mark in my life up to that point.

But the brief moment of glory was marred by a colossal blunder that still makes me cringe. I’m wearing a grimace as I write this.

I decided to do a little advertising after the book came out, and printed a few dozen flyers on the most garish neon green paper that Kinko’s had to offer.

After midnight, I set out on a guerrilla marketing effort. The plan? To tape my flyers to every white column of every building on campus.

Of course, I knew the rule against posting advertisements. But I also knew what happened to them. Upon discovery by campus workers, advertisements were swiftly cleared away and disposed of. The evidence of that—four pieces of Scotch tape forming the frame of removed flyers—was everywhere on campus.

I figured that the few hours my flyers remained up might help me get the word out about my book. So I blanketed campus with them and retired for the night.

After dragging myself out of bed sometime around 1 p.m., I went back to campus to see how many of my flyers had survived the inevitable purge.

It was raining, and I pulled the hood of my Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket over my head (it was a different time). But when I set foot on McKeldin Mall, I was met with an unexpected sight. My flyers did not appear to have been removed. At a distance, I could see neon green rectangles on every pillar I’d placed them on.

But when I got closer to one, I realized the horrifying truth. These weren’t my flyers—they were the stains the flyers had left on the pillars after being soaked with rain. The damage to campus property seemed incalculable.

I got on my scooter and drove to a store, where I purchased gallons of bleach and several rolls of paper towels, then raced back to the nearest pillar and started scrubbing.

I’ve never worked as hard, physically, as I did in the hours that followed. I managed to get most of the green stains out, but traces remained, maybe even to this day. By the time I was finished, the sleeves of my Starter jacket were as full of holes as Swiss cheese. To this day, I can’t look at Starter jackets without cringing, either.

That moment marked the end of my time at the University of Maryland. It seemed like a fitting ending.

TWO YEARS AFTER I graduated from Maryland, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I’d moved to Boston and had gotten a job as a newspaper designer on the North Shore, an hour’s drive from my tiny apartment.

This wasn’t where I’d expected to be. I’d set my sights on becoming an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—a not-unrealistic goal, since I’d worked as a computer programmer at headquarters for two years. But then Waco happened, and the agency stopped hiring, so I was sent spinning in a different direction.

Every night when I came home from my job at the newspaper, I worked on my comics submissions, trying to get noticed by one of the big cartoon syndicates, which are the gatekeepers for newspapers. Rejections followed. The only feedback I ever got was when the head of one syndicate wrote, “Change the name” in a ballpoint scrawl. Fair enough. My strip was called “Igdoof.”

At the time, newspapers were starting to contract. Most big cities still had two dailies, but many were now down to one. I knew that my prospects for becoming a newspaper cartoonist—my rock-star dream—might be out of reach.

One day when I was driving north on the highway, I noticed a billboard with a black backing and white letters. It read: “Well done is better than well said.”

The quote was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and it hit me hard. I’d been telling everyone I was going to become a newspaper cartoonist. My failure to do so was starting to suffocate me. After seeing that quote, I decided to keep my ambitions to myself until I had something that was worth sharing.

Not long after, I came up with the idea for “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” a book about a flawed middle schooler with an aversion to cheese. But thanks to Benjamin Franklin, I told no one. I toiled in secret on my manuscript for nine years. Because a dream is a fragile thing, and it needs to be protected.

All these years later, I still think about that quote. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to put something like that on a billboard? Couldn’t they have made more money with an ad featuring, say, Joe Camel?

Whoever it was, and whatever your motivations, this cartoonist thanks you. But it really was a crazy thing to do.

EVERY GOOD VIDEO GAME has a few side quests. On my path to becoming a children’s author, I had a serious diversion.

After a one-year stint at the newspaper, I became a programmer for a medical software company (take that, computer science department administrator!) and then an internet video game designer. One day, when I was mowing my tiny lawn, I had an idea.

This was right around the time when iPods and similar devices were proliferating. Suddenly, you could take all your digital stuff with you—your music, your photos, even your books. This was during the heyday of kids’ games like Animal Crossing and Club Penguin, where the goal was to collect a lot of stuff and deck out your avatar and virtual home.

But what if your characters could take all their stuff with them?

This seed of a thought later became Poptropica, a kids’ site that would entertain and educate a generation of kids.

I wish I could take credit for the coding. But by then, I’d maxed out on my programming skills, which the university had rightly determined were subpar.

If I wanted to get this ambitious product off the ground, I was going to need to bring in a few hired guns.

So I posted a job listing on a website for a lead developer. I got one bite, from a guy named Jordan Leary, who lived in Utah. His resume consisted of a single line: “My work speaks for itself.”

This line grabbed me. What kind of person could be that audacious? Curious, I went through his entire digital portfolio. His work really did speak for itself. It was creative, visionary, maybe even genius. I hired him, and he became the head of a sprawling team of developers and designers who brought Poptropica to life for hundreds of millions of kids.

I found out years later that Jordan hadn’t meant to post that one line instead of his full resume. He’d just written that text as a placeholder, which he’d planned to replace with his actual resume.

If he had, I fear I might have overlooked him. Because confidence that’s backed up by talent is appealing to me.

And to butcher a Sir Isaac Newton quote, if you want to go further than you can on your own, sometimes, you have to stand on the shoulders of geniuses. I’m grateful for the shoulders I was allowed to stand on.

“I WROTE A FEW children’s books ... not on purpose.” —Stephen Wright

The only downside of listening to Benjamin Franklin and keeping your ambitions to yourself is that you stay in a silo, your grand plans untested by people who matter.

In the nine years I worked on “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” not for one second did I think I was writing for children. I know this sounds a bit mad, but it’s true.

Growing up, my favorite section of the bookstore was the Humor section. It was a catch-all for anything that was funny: Jerry Seinfeld’s memoir, collections of dirty jokes and the latest Far Side Gallery.

Having left Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary behind years ago, I had no idea what was going on in the Middle Grades category, or even that there was such a thing. With “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” I had my sights set on the shelves of the Humor section, where the funny stuff went.

IN EVERY STORY, the protagonist hits a few bumps in the road. I’ve had my share along the way.

When my second book came out, I got a call from a movie studio that was interested in buying the rights to “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” My lawyer told me that studios don’t like to get into bidding wars, so I had 24 hours to consider the offer before they took it off the table.

At that time, I was fully enmeshed in a book tour, and fully exhausted. I was getting four or five hours of sleep a night and making two or three stops a day. So when the clock ran out, I begged my lawyer for one hour of sleep before I made my decision.

My lawyer warned that the offer would be off the table by the time I woke up. I thought about it. I decided the nap was worth the risk. When I woke up, the offer was still there. I’m not sure if this is really a transferable life lesson, but sometimes you just need that nap.

The producer the studio hired to make the film, a Hollywood big-timer, told me how the screenwriting process would work. They’d hire writers to “sing in the same tune” as my books. I wouldn’t be the screenwriter, but I’d be a part of the process.

I wanted to be the screenwriter myself, but truthfully, I wasn’t even remotely qualified. Sometimes novelists think that if they can write a full-length book, then surely they could bang out a double-spaced 90-page manuscript.

While there are some success stories, more often than not, novelists-turned-first-time-screenwriters get fired and replaced. I didn’t want that to be me.

Three “Wimpy Kid” films later, I’d learned a thing or two about movie-making. My time spent in creative meetings and on location taught me how the sausage got made. And so when the subject came up of hiring a screenwriter to tackle the fourth movie, I raised my hand. I thought I was ready.

It turns out, I wasn’t. I wrote a well-received first draft, then followed it up with a not-so-well-received second draft. Working on the third, while also writing and illustrating the 10th “Wimpy Kid” book, put me at my desk for upwards of 16 hours a day. And then a plane crashed into the house next to mine—no lie—and I got shingles from the cumulative stress.

Like my first Poptropica hire, my work spoke for itself, but poorly. I hadn’t put in the time to learn the craft. I wasn’t ready for my opportunity. I raised my hand too soon. And I got fired.

Not my finest moment, and one that still stings. But I took my lessons along with my lumps, and over time, learned how to write a proper screenplay.

Since then, I’ve written five scripts for Disney+, all of which have been made into animated films, with more on the way. But my first-effort failure was enough to remind me that I’m capable of falling flat on my face, which is a strong motivation to watch where I’m going.

I’VE DOCUMENTED SOME of my failings in the pages of this magazine, but to balance things out, it seems like the right time to mention a win. Because if my mom has read this far, she deserves something positive.

If I were to flip through the pages of my early books, I could draw a direct connection between almost every vignette in Greg’s journal and something that happened in my life growing up in Fort Washington, Md. Yes, the cheese was a real thing, but I’ll never tell who ate it.

After those first five books, I’d pretty much exhausted the childhood memories that formed my source material. I needed to invent authentic-seeming childhood memories.

And so, I entered into a challenging time. Every year, I wrote a new book, and every year, I tried some new tactic for developing material. I lay on the couch with a blanket over my head. I rode my bike in circles for hours. I took long walks—sometimes 10 miles or more—waiting for providence to deliver me an original idea. More often than not, the idea never came.

Then one day, at the company where I worked, management hired some creativity experts from Tel Aviv to come train us. They had developed a proven system to generate creative solutions, which they called Systematic Inventive Thinking.

I’ll give you a quick primer. Take an object, like a pair of glasses. List the components: lenses, frames. Now, apply a few tools to each component. Subtraction, division, multiplication and a few more that are a little too involved for this piece.

Let’s subtract the lenses from the glasses. Do we have a product anyone could use? Yes. Sports stars who don’t have problems with their vision but want to look fashionable might use lensless glasses.

What if you subtract the frames? Could anybody use that? Well, sure, if you shrunk the lenses and made them thinner. Now you’ve got contact lenses.

This method unlocked a whole new world for me as a comedy writer. These days, I start every book with a theme, and I list components that go with that theme. My last book was about a birthday party, so my components were cake, frosting, candles, gifts and about 290 more.

Then, I apply the tools I mentioned above to each component. At the end, I’ve got more than a thousand jokes. I use the best 250.

Now, I feel like I can write books forever. You might not be a children’s writer, but I promise that you can use these tools to overcome hurdles in your life and work. It sure beats riding your bike around in circles.

THE FIRST TIME I was invited to write for Terp 14 years ago, I was given a topic for a brief essay: “Tell us about a time when you were fearless.”

I knew the kind of thing I was expected to write. I was supposed to say I was fearless in doing such-and-such in my career, which led to success in my profession. But I didn’t have anything like that in my punchbowl of experiences.

The truth is, I’ve always been cautious. I don’t let go of the vine behind me until I’ve got a firm grip on the next one. To wit: Eleven years after my first “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book came out, and 12 books into the series, I was still holding onto my day job at Poptropica, just in case. A profile in courage I was not.

And then, an unexpected spark—of something—took hold. These days, I live in a small town called Plainville, Mass., population 9,000. At its center was a dilapidated building, constructed before Abraham Lincoln was president, that served as a general store for generations of residents. But those days were long gone, and when I moved to town, the building had been empty for 17 years.

So when the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books started to break out, I had an idea. What if my wife and I bought the building, and put something different in its place? Why not a bookstore?

ANYONE WHO’S CRACKED OPEN one of my books can’t help but notice that Greg Heffley is a flawed character. In fact, his imperfections are what make him both loved—and loathed—by readers and their parents.

At times, Greg’s flaws are amplified and exaggerated versions of my own. At other times, my imperfections are amplifications of his. It all gets tangled up, and sometimes I have trouble keeping track of where reality ends and the fiction begins.

Here’s the thing about having a successful book series, or a successful anything: When you’ve stumbled onto a winning formula, it validates your behaviors, even the bad ones. Because everything you’ve done has led you up to this point.

Something I’ve learned in the past five years is how wrongheaded that thinking is. Like Greg, I’m a collection of bad habits. Diet, exercise, discipline—I’m a mess in every category across the board.

Truthfully, it all caught up with me in my 50s. I realized I haven’t had success because of my flaws but despite them.

For most of my life, I hadn’t done a good job of taking care of myself. But my days now start with meditation, yoga, stretching and exercise. I plan my days and even my years. Never could I have imagined I’d embark on this kind of change.

I’m hoping I can stick around for a while because there are more books to write, movies to make, buildings to build. Grandkids to look after, God willing.

It’s time to level up as a human being, to figure this all out, to grow. Just like Greg, I’ve got lots to learn.

And by the way, did you know that there’s a hidden nail file tucked away in those nail clippers? Mind blown.

By Lauren Brown

FOR SOMEONE WHO’S SOLD over 300 million books, Jeff Kinney is a remarkably unassuming guy. Sure, his studio includes a statue of Scrooge McDuck (rumored to have been previously owned by Michael Jackson) and a 6-foot-tall screen display modeled after Greg Heffley’s dreaded cheese touch (above). But he was kind, earnest and dedicated to making this package come together. This, despite a pile of commitments that would make most of us chuck our laptops into a lake.

Kinney squeezed us in between writing two Disney+ screenplays based on his “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. He’s written 20 of the books since 2007, with the latest, “Fight or Flight,” scheduled for publication in October. They’ve been turned into three live-action movie adaptations and four 3D-animated movies. He’s also co-written three books in the “Awesome Friendly Kid” series, written from the perspective of Greg’s best friend, Rowley.

Kinney and his wife own An Unlikely Story Bookstore & Cafe in Plainville, Mass., and have two sons, one of whom is a 2025 UMD graduate. Kinney returned to his alma mater in 2022 to dedicate a new statue (that looks surprisingly similar in size to Scrooge McDuck’s) of Greg in the Stamp Student Union and to deliver the Commencement address. It was the only time in Maryland history that the words “Zoo-Wee Mama” were used in such a speech.