The rule of jotting down your thought on the instant does not apply merely to ideas that come as inspirations, or thoughts suggested by what you read or see, but it applies especially to the ideas that come to you at the time you give yourself up to concentrated thinking in play-production.  A certain writer on the photoplay—­we do not recall who—­once wrote a paragraph headed “When do you do your thinking?” This critic found that he could think best when riding, say on a street car.  Others have discovered that ideas come to them most freely when they are sitting in a theatre.  One writer has learned that his best plot-ideas come to him after he lies down for the night.  For this reason, a tabouret with pad and pencil always stands at his bedside, and a special self-installed switch for the electric light is within reach of his hand.  Now, with his note-book always with him when he is away from home, with note-books and card-indexes close at hand when he is at home, and with the means of instantly putting his thoughts on paper if they come to him after he has gone to bed, he knows that he is in a position to take advantage of every stray idea that may contain a plot germ, or that may aid him in developing a story already in course of construction.

If the beginner would only understand the importance of systematic note-making, he would soon reduce by one-half the labor of unearthing plots for his stories.

4.  The Borrowed Plot

All is grist that comes to the mill of the writer who keeps a note-book.  Almost everything that he reads, sees, or hears, offers some plot-suggestion, or suggests a better way of working out the plot he has already partly developed.  But, in taking plot-ideas from the daily papers and writing stories suggested by the anecdotes and the conversation of friends, proceed with great care, lest you make trouble for yourself or for others.  In a later chapter we show how many cases of alleged plagiarism are simply the results of two people taking the same idea from the same newspaper paragraph.  The point here made is that if you take an idea from a newspaper item there are three courses open to you—­one safe course, and two not safe.  The unsafe ways are, to recopy the story bodily, using in your story all the facts set forth in the news item; or else to change it only enough to insure its being “the same, yet not the same.”  If you adopt either of these two foolish and dangerous methods, you are extremely likely to find that you have either been forestalled by someone who wrote a story on the subject before you did, or that your story, following closely the original facts, has given offense to someone who was concerned in the actual case.  If you live in a small community, the risk of thus offending is, of course, correspondingly greater.

The one safe way is to use the plot-germ, and only the plot-germ, taken from the item in the paper.  If you can take the central idea and remodel it so that the very reporter who wrote the original item would not recognize it, you may legitimately claim to have produced an original story.  That is, moreover, what you should do, leaving aside all questions of your script’s being accepted, and the possibility of its being refused because of its similarity to one previously purchased from some other writer.