{"id":29432,"date":"2022-05-04T12:45:08","date_gmt":"2022-05-04T16:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/?page_id=29432"},"modified":"2022-12-19T03:06:10","modified_gmt":"2022-12-19T07:06:10","slug":"quotes-on-why-write-human-interest-stories","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/writing-tips\/how-to-write-creative-content\/human-interest-stories\/quotes-on-why-write-human-interest-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotes on why write human-interest stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

What writers and others say<\/h2>\n

\"Human

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“Show them the forest; introduce them to a tree.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 William Blundell, author of The Art and Craft of Feature Writing<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“It seems hardly necessary to prove the importance of human interest \u2026 [P]eople are most interested in other people.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Rudolph Flesch, creator of the Flesch Reading Ease formula<\/h6>\n
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“Keep it people, stupid.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Karen Friedman, television reporter turned media trainer<\/h6>\n
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“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Ernest Hemingway, American novelist and short story writer<\/h6>\n
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“It is very difficult to make people out of words.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Larry Leonard, Oregon writer, quoted by Jack Hart in A Writer’s Coach<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“People fall in love with people, not statistics. \u2026 Stories with people in them tend to attract more than those without.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Peter Jacobi, professor emeritus and Adjunct Riley Lecturer at the Indiana University School of Journalism<\/h6>\n
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“The campaign against cancer, [father of modern chemotherapy Sidney Farber] learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans \u2014 the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“[Good writers] tell not of a battle, but of a soldier, they talk not about governance, but about a deal, they discuss not a socioeconomic group, but a person and a life.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, in Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Recounting tactical movements of troops in the course of a campaign will convey little of the reality of battle to a reader. But show that reader one soldier on one patrol; reveal that soldier’s solitary, personal encounter with gore and glory, disaster and dread; and you can drive home something of what it all means. The soldier’s actions are concrete. The doings of his battalion are abstract. It is the difference between a casualty count and someone’s dead body.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 William Ruehlmann, author of Stalking the Feature Story<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out. A frisson of horror may go down one’s spine at wholesale destruction, but one’s heart stays unmoved. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Josephine Tey, author of The Daughter of Time<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Readers love money makeovers \u2014 those profiles of real families that get into the gory details of how much credit card debt they owe and how far behind on retirement savings they are.”<\/h5>\n
“Most of the appeal is voyeurism, but the popularity of these profiles illustrates how important a real, live, breathing person is when you’re trying to write about personal finance. People who would yawn at a headline about the nation’s woeful savings rate will stop and read every word if you’re writing about how Jane Minski of Oak Grove can’t pass up a sale.”<\/h5>\n
“You can definitely boost your readership and better drive home your points if you include more real people in every story.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Liz Pulliam Weston, MSN Money columnist, writing on BusinessJournalism.org<\/h6>\n
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“Don’t write about man, write about a man.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 E.B. White, author of the writer’s “bible,” The Elements of Style<\/em><\/h6>\n
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