The fact that the market is wide makes it the less excusable when a writer courts rejection by attempting themes with which he is not familiar.  If you live on an Eastern or Middle-West farm, or in a small town, remember that—­especially between the months of May and September—­the film companies almost without exception are looking for good stories of country life.  Then why try to write stories of business life in a large city, of society, of theatrical or circus life, or even of the far West, until you have succeeded with a few stories that might easily be set within a short distance of where you live?  Correct and faithful local color, at times, has much to do with selling a story, though you always need a good idea and a clever plot.

The same rule, naturally, should be followed by the young writer whose home is in a large city.  If you can turn out a good, original story truthfully portraying New York’s East Side, Broadway, or Wall Street; Chicago’s “Loop” district; the social and political life of Washington, or any other such background, there is an editor waiting to purchase that story.

All this is not to say that you must write only of things which are, or have been, within the range of your personal experience.  Many a writer has successfully built his story on well-verified second-hand knowledge.  If you are not familiar with the subject at first-hand, and cannot get direct, personal information, get the knowledge from books and periodicals, but get it exactly—­squeeze the last drop of information from the subject.  If there is no library in your town, search your own as well as borrowed books and magazines until you find at least enough correct data to enable you to turn out a script that will not betray second-hand knowledge.  Jules Verne had only indirect knowledge of most of the countries which he depicted, yet to read his books one would believe that he had travelled everywhere.  Because he had read up on and investigated his subjects he was able to produce such thoroughly convincing, and always interesting, books as “A Tour of the World in Eighty Days,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” and “The Clipper of the Clouds,” in which he wrote, and apparently authoritatively, of almost every country on the globe.

Until your work is pretty well known by the editors, it is just as well not to attempt to write historical dramas.  But if you do write them, the greatest care must be taken to adhere closely to facts, especially in composing scripts in which famous historical personages figure.  Three or four years ago a certain company that made a specialty of two- and three-part historical, Western, and military dramas, was called to account by an army officer in Washington for having brought out a photoplay of pioneer life which held up a well-known officer of the United States army in a rather bad light by making him responsible for an act of great injustice to a famous Indian chieftain.  The author of the photoplay—­whether a staff-writer or a free lance—­was doubtless unaware that he was doing an injustice to the memory of a gallant and kind-hearted American soldier; but, however the picture came to be written, it elicited the strong disapproval of someone who knew, and who did not hesitate to tell the makers that a mistake had been made.