If you have a typewriter you will, of course, make at least one carbon copy.  Should the script you send out be lost or badly marred in any way, you have the carbon from which you can make another, but never be so unwise as to send out the carbon copy itself should the original be lost.  Make a new copy.  In the first place, should the carbon copy also be lost, you will have nothing left as a record of your story—­unless you happen to have kept your notes and rough draft.  Besides, carbon copies rarely look as well as an original script, and the editor who receives a carbon might not look upon it with any great favor—­though this is the least valid reason.

Another important point is, if your photoplay is accepted, your copy will serve you as a valuable basis for criticism of your own work, inasmuch as you can compare the play as written with the play as produced, observing what changes the editor and director may have deemed necessary.  This practice is followed pretty generally by earnest writers of fiction, but is applicable also to photoplay writing, and should help the writer, after seeing his play produced, to do even better work next time.

For carbon copies, almost any weight and quality of paper will serve.  A plain yellow or a manilla paper, costing about 50 cents a box of 500 sheets, is very satisfactory.

Most authors who are users of typewriters know that a black “record” ribbon is far superior to a “copying” ribbon.  The latter is likely to smudge or blur and spoil a clean manuscript.  Again, it pays to get a pretty good grade of carbon paper; the best, in fact, is none too good for literary work of any kind.  Cheap carbons smear the copy and stain the writer’s fingers; besides, they have a tendency to make the copy look as if it were covered with a fine layer of soot or black dust.  Avoid them.

GENERAL DIRECTIONS.  Other hard and fast rules for the practice of photoplay writing are: 

Do not write on both sides of the paper.

Do not fasten the sheets of your script with clips or pins which perforate the paper; there are at least half-a-dozen kinds of paper clips which hold the sheets firmly without permanently fastening them together.  The editor likes to have the sheets loose when reading the script.

Above all, do not roll your script.  If it is 8-1/2 by 11 paper, as it ought to be, fold it no more than twice.  That is what all writers do who follow the rules.

DIRECTIONS FOR TYPING THE SCRIPT.  While it is well to remember that the suggestions here offered are intended for those who type their own photoplays, the same suggestions can be made by authors to the professional typists to whom they send their stories to be prepared for the editor.