The People’s Home Journal
The conscientious writer of fiction, the man who takes his work seriously, is sure to get his innings. And at no time in the history of magazines has this been so true as now. War conditions were responsible for a four-years’ opportunity seized by too many mediocre writers to get their wares before the reading public. The result has been a healthy, vigorous reaction against the sort of stuff Editors were perhaps obliged to accept when so many able-bodied, sober-minded drivers of the quill were across the sea fighting for battle honors instead of bay wreaths.
Because for thirty-six years The People’s Home Journal has been called “the magazine for every member of the family,” it has offered a more inclusive market for fiction than magazines making their principal appeal to women. Big stories of the out of doors have helped to swell the Journal’s circulation. On the other hand, the kind of story that surprises the laugh before the tear is over is popular with our readers.
Certainly these readers will not stand either for the dry-as-dust, categorical type of story, nor for the rapid-fire type, the kind manufactured, not created. The Journal’s rising newsstand sales respond barometer-wise to a Journal serial built around love, mystery or high adventure, but crowded with real things happening and truthful in its transcript of healthy emotions. Studies in morbid pathology come to every Editor’s desk, usually from the amateur, but the sane reactions which follow situations dealing with real people are what most readers understand and like. The villain who might be your next-door neighbor, the hero who could have jostled elbows with you in the subway, the heroine who is the not impossible she of every man’s dreams are sure to score.
There will always be a demand for the psychological story. And the story dealing with mental processes can be made as tense and gripping as the so-called action story if it has actual story interest. But too many psychological stories start out to prove something of no importance.
In the last analysis, “the story’s the thing,” whether it deals with battle, murder or sudden death, or with the complexities of mind induced by a given situation.
If I were asked to explain briefly what I considered the chief characteristic of The People’s Home Journal story, I would say that it is dramatic because it interprets life in a way to stir the emotions, and I would add that it usually contains a message, always clear to the reader, a message which lingers in his memory when perhaps the plot, the characters and the story’s charm have faded.
Mary Botsford Charlton.
The People’s Home Journal.
76-88 Lafayette Street,
New York City.