You can hardly go too far in making a study of the various motion-picture trade journals, because, quite apart from the material furnished by the different studio publicity departments—­which material, for a certain week, may be practically the same in all the publicity mediums—­each periodical may be depended upon to have at frequent intervals if not in every issue some good special article that will either help to instruct the writer or furnish a “tip” as to the immediate needs of a certain company.  While we make special mention of The Moving Picture World because of the fact that it has had Mr. Sargent’s department as a regular feature for over eight years, we also recommend the student to keep regularly in touch with what is published in the Motion Picture News (New York), the New York Dramatic Mirror, Motography (Chicago), and—­for the sake of their critical reviews—­any other trade periodicals he may be able to procure.  Apart from the trade journals, you can always be sure of finding well-written special articles or regular departments of interest to photoplaywrights in such monthly and semi-monthly magazines as Photoplay (Chicago), Motion Picture Magazine and Motion Picture Classic (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Picture-play Magazine (New York), and Moving Picture Stories (New York).  Many popular magazines also print excellent photoplay material frequently and such craft-periodicals as The Writer’s Monthly (Springfield, Mass.) are always especially helpful to authors.  All such tools of the writer’s trade you should get as regularly as you can—­and use them.

So long as you get your plot-ideas honestly, where you get them is altogether your own matter.  But get them you must, for, as A. Van Buren Powell has said:  “Everyone will grant that in photoplay writing ‘The Idea’s the thing.’  The script of the beginner, carrying a brand-new idea, will find acceptance where the most technical technique in the world, disguising a revamped story, will fail to coax the coy check from its lair.”

So, let your ideas be original. Get your inspiration, your plot-germ, from any source, but be sure that, before you claim the story for your own, you have so changed and reconstructed the original that it is absolutely yours.

Here is a paragraph by Mr. Eugene V. Brewster, in Motion Picture Magazine, of which he is editor:  “It is extremely difficult to think out a plot that has not been done before.  You may not have seen it before, you may have invented the whole thing out of your brain, but the probabilities are that the manufacturers have done the same thing, with slight variations, time and time again, and that the same idea has been submitted to them dozens of times.  You may think you have worked out something entirely new, but you should remember that the regular writers employed by the manufacturers have been reading and thinking for years in an effort to devise something new, and that they have been trained to do this very thing.”