McCall’s Magazine
McCall’s finds it hard to specify its standards of the perfect McCall story, because we believe a magazine should cultivate a diversity of story types. A publication with a circulation of over one million and a half, read by people scattered all over the United States, should carefully select from a wide field.
In a short story, we demand first, perhaps that it be a story; that it tell itself convincingly, and interestingly, with its due measure of plot, characterization and charm of style. Honesty and truthfulness in theme and treatment are essential. Though we are opposed to the sentimental and saccharine tale which has been the accepted convention for the woman’s magazine, we believe in romance and adventure and glamour. Life is colored with those three things, and a story is either dull or fantastic unless it bear relation to life.
Although McCall’s is a woman’s magazine, we believe there is no sex in reading, that a woman is not necessarily interested in the old conventionally accepted story in which gilded heroes and heroines pranced through a hectic and golden existence, in which the heroine’s name was always Gwen or Violet, in which the desired male prize was always married off to the poor but noble girl at the consummating altar. Nor need all women’s magazine stories have to do with the abuse of the sacrificial mother or the efforts of an orphan stenographer alone in a great city. Love and money and fame may be fundamental pillars of plots, as of life; but to-day’s woman, even as to-day’s flapper, demands more than the sentimental narration of their intertwinings.
As for the young author, we welcome him—or her. The famous and the arrived have their place, but the world is ever to the oncoming. If there is a germ of a story in any neophyte’s contribution, McCall’s is only too glad to throw all its energies into framing for it a more effective setting.
Bessie Beatty.
McCall’s Magazine.
236-250 West Thirty-seventh Street,
New York City.