What writers and others say
“Show them the forest; introduce them to a tree.”
— William Blundell, author of The Art and Craft of Feature Writing
“It seems hardly necessary to prove the importance of human interest … [P]eople are most interested in other people.”
— Rudolph Flesch, creator of the Flesch Reading Ease formula
“Keep it people, stupid.”
— Karen Friedman, television reporter turned media trainer
“Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.”
— Ernest Hemingway, American novelist and short story writer
“It is very difficult to make people out of words.”
— Larry Leonard, Oregon writer, quoted by Jack Hart in A Writer’s Coach
“People fall in love with people, not statistics. … Stories with people in them tend to attract more than those without.”
— Peter Jacobi, professor emeritus and Adjunct Riley Lecturer at the Indiana University School of Journalism
“The campaign against cancer, [father of modern chemotherapy Sidney Farber] learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans — 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.”
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies
“[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.”
— Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, in Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work
“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.”
— William Ruehlmann, author of Stalking the Feature Story
“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.”
— Josephine Tey, author of The Daughter of Time
“Readers love money makeovers — 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.”
“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.”
“You can definitely boost your readership and better drive home your points if you include more real people in every story.”
— Liz Pulliam Weston, MSN Money columnist, writing on BusinessJournalism.org
“Don’t write about man, write about a man.”
— E.B. White, author of the writer’s “bible,” The Elements of Style
How can you tell better business stories?
Stories are so effective that Og Mandino, the late author of the bestselling The Greatest Salesman in the World, says, “If you have a point, find a story.”
Learn to find, develop and write stories that engage readers’ hearts and minds at Master the Art of Storytelling, our content-writing training workshop.
There, you’ll learn how to find the aha! moment that’s the gateway to every anecdote. How to start an anecdote with a bang — instead of a whimper. And how to use “the most powerful form of human communication” to grab attention, boost credibility, make messages more memorable and communicate better.
