Writing a human interest piece? Unlike most regular non-fiction work, the primary component for these types of writing is the human element. That emotional component that lets people identify with the story is, ultimately what will truly define it.
For longtime non-fiction writers, that means avoiding some of the common habits that might have served you in more factual, communicative writing (that doesn’t include a powerful writing software, though – that’s a given, whatever you’re working on). When producing human interest pieces, you have to:
- Aim to entertain as much as communicate.
- Appeal to your reader’s sensitivities by allowing them to experience the same emotions as the primary characters of the piece.
- Turn readers into vicarious participants, ultimately seeing themselves in the characters’ shoes.
Not every type of story can be turned into a human interest piece. A few, however, merely needs a human angle to be adequately appropriate. If you’re trying to gauge a subject’s viability for this type of writing, consider that all human interest pieces generally fulfill the following criteria:
- They involve an extraordinary experience, one that most people will likely not have gone through in their own lives.
- They involve a common, easily-identifiable problem. Without conflict, there’s no story. So there must be a struggle of some sort, one that your average reader can readily understand and, possibly, even identify with.
- They can be related to a national issue, one that’s running through the mind of people at this very moment.
If you have all that, then your topic might indeed do very well as a human interest piece. Now comes the hard part – actually writing them.
