True, it is difficult to think out a plot that has not been done before; but this very fact, instead of discouraging the writer, should offer him the greater incentive to discover original ideas for his stories.  That the manufacturers are once in a while forced to make over their old plays should convince the photoplaywright that they are more than willing to buy new ones if they are the kind they are looking for, and that he should study the market to see what the manufacturers want, and then write the kind they are looking for.

Lastly, we would say most emphatically that the staff-writers employed by the different companies have absolutely no advantage over the trained and intelligent free-lance author in the production of original plays.  It is just as hard to think up original plots if one is on the salary list of one of the manufacturers as it is for you who do your work at home and turn out only one script a month.  The important fact is, that the staff-writer would never have been offered the position he holds had not the editor recognized his ability to keep up a fairly steady output of plays with plots and technical points of more than average merit.  He was an original writer before he became a member of the staff, not because he is in the employ of the producer.

The field is wide and growing, but nowhere is there room for untrained, incompetent, hit-or-miss dabblers.  The man who is in earnest, who keeps in touch with what is going on in the trade, who watches the pictures to gain ideas and inspiration, who studies the life about him to find plot-suggestions and motives, and who, once started, keeps at it—­working, working, working—­cannot fail to find that his reward will justify the effort.

CHAPTER XV

WHAT YOU CANNOT WRITE

The caption of this chapter must be taken as a serious warning that there are certain things which you cannot write into a script unless you wish to insure its rejection.  These specific warnings are based on the experiences of amateurs who have had their scripts returned with the brief and unsatisfactory statement that they were “not available for present use,” or that the “cost of production is too great.”

1.  Asking the Impossible or the Impracticable

It is a constant source of mingled amusement and dismay to editors to read some of the impossible or impracticable things that amateur photoplaywrights wish to have done in the course of the action of their stories.  Three things are responsible for this common fault in photoplay plotting:  the writer’s very limited knowledge of the limitations of the photoplay stage; an intense desire to be original; and the fact that, having seen in the pictures themselves so many evidences that the manufacturers do not let the question of expense stand in the way of attaining spectacular and realistic effects, they go blindly ahead and introduce scenes to take which would so enormously run up the cost of producing the picture that the expense involved would be out of all proportion to the value of the scene as a part of the story.