Chapter 14
I Write to Mr. Kemble

I took the letter from Mr. Kemble not just as an encouragement but also as an opportunity.

There was that determination in my Belle blood coming out again! But I figured I ought to make the most of the fact that he’d written and seemed interested.

So I decided to write back and ask him some questions so I’d be able to know what to do differently in the future. I had thought the story about Alkali Jones was good, and hadn’t expected anybody to pay much attention to what I’d written about Katie. As it turned out, my figuring was exactly opposite from Mr. Kemble’s. Not only that, two months after his letter, another letter came, telling me that a paper from Raleigh, Virginia, had written to ask permission from the Alta to reprint the Katie story! The name C.B. Hollister was going to be read clear back on the East Coast!

I wrote to Mr. Kemble and asked him just what it was about the “Virginian” article that his paper liked and wanted more of.

About three weeks later I got a reply.

“There’re two kinds of stories,” he told me. “First, there’s straight news reporting. That’s when you’ve got to tell your who, what, where, when, and why. Those are your w’s, and no reporter better forget them for a second.

“But then you’ve got your human interest kind of stories. They’re more personal. The who and the why are still important, but you’re telling about people instead of just facts, so the other things aren’t quite so important.

“Now, you take your ‘Virginian’ story. That was human interest if ever I saw such a thing. Once you got folks interested in your Katie Morgan, they kept reading. They weren’t trying to find out news or facts; they were reading because you were telling a story about a person.

“I’ve got lots of reporters who can give me the five w’s. One rambunctious kid on my staff chases around this city night and day and is the first person on the scene of anything that happens. Now he’s a newshound!

“I’m not saying that if you brought me some noteworthy news like that I wouldn’t print it. Maybe I would. But from the two stories of yours we’ve run so far, something tells me your talent tends more toward the human interest side. You seem to see interesting things in people. And if you can keep doing that, keep finding interesting people and keep finding interesting ways to tell folks about them, then I don’t doubt you might just have a future in this business. Leave the five w’s to the newshounds like that Irish kid on my staff I was telling you about. Stick to the personal angles, Hollister, and let me see anything you come up with.”

He didn’t say it in that same letter, but much later when he and I were talking about similar things, he said some other things along this line.

“Women and men are different in how they read a paper,” he told me. “Now we’ve got more men than women in California, but we still have thousands of women readers, and we’ve got to please them, too.

“Men want to know news and not much else. They’re your five w’s readers. Give them what happened, where, when, and why and they’ll put the paper down and get on with what they got to do. Men want to know whether it’s likely to rain, what kind of damage the flood caused, what price gold is fetching, whether there’ve been any new strikes, and how much a new pick or a fifty-pound sack of beans is going to cost.

“But a woman’ll look through the paper while she’s drinking her tea, and she’ll want to read about Polly Pinswiggle’s garden that the rain washed out. That woman reading about Polly doesn’t care a hoot about how many inches it rained or about what the seed is going to cost to plant a new garden. All she’s thinking about is poor Polly!

“The women are your people readers. And that’s why we’ve got people like you writing human interest stuff. You’ve got to go out and find interesting people who are involved in interesting things and then write about them, mixing in a little news too, and getting three or four of the w’s in there to please your traditional men-editors like me.

“In other words, you’ve got to sort of pretend to be a reporter, a newsperson. But really you’re not. What you are is a journalist, a writer about people, not facts. And as long as you keep writing about people, you can count on having readers, whether you ever dig up any hard news or not.”

All this he didn’t tell me, as I said, until later. But even now, without realizing it, I think this was the way my interest in writing was heading. I’d been keeping a journal all this time, not just to record the facts of my life, like where I went and what I did and what the weather was like—what Mr. Kemble would have called the five w’s. I kept a journal to write about a person—a person who happened to be me—and what she was thinking and feeling inside.

In a way, the other writing that I was starting to do now—about Mr. Jones and Katie and the Wards and Jack Lame Pony—was kind of like the writing I did in my journal, but about other people instead of me.

Having Mr. Kemble tell me about the two different kinds of writing helped me understand it a lot better. But besides the five w’s and the human interest kind of story, there was one other ingredient that I came to see was an important part of any writing that anybody did. Maybe it was the most important ingredient of all.

And I have Rev. Rutledge to thank for putting this other factor in focus for me.