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PLOT FORMATION 67 Suppose it occurs to you that you can make a capital comedy of the trials of a book agent. There are all sorts of chances for fun in what happens to a book salesman, so you string a lot of these funny things together and regard your work with satisfaction. You've been told that a comedy story must have plenty of action and humorous action, at that, so this must be a good story be- cause it is just full of funny things. The book agent starts out in the morning. He is kicked out of an office, is chased from a house by an irate housewife armed with a broom, he is doused with water at another place, and so it goes for twenty or thirty scenes, according to how your in- ventiveness holds out. All your friends have laughed themselves sick over the funny things you've written, and they will assure you that it is a better story than those they see on the screen, but not one of them knows enough, probably, to tell you that it isn't a story at all, and probably you would not believe the man who said such a thing, yet it is no more a story than is the multiplication table. You do not have to stop at twelve times twelve. You can run it up to forty-two times twelve or a hundred and eighteen times twelve and still have a million times twelve to look forward to. A multiplication table has a start, but practically no ending, and so has this story. You can write forty scenes or sixty or six hun- dred and still arrive at no definite ending, and a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. That's been the standard defi- nition of a play for centuries and it holds as good today as the day it was written. This story has a start, because we see the man is a book agent and he wants to sell his books. It has no finish because he is not working toward some definite end. He may keep on want- ing to sell books to the day of his death. That would end the story, but we could keep on putting in funny things — if we can think of enough—to run the story up to a million feet. The story must not only have a start, but an objective point. Now we'll take this book agent and write a real story about him. The agent is Tim Green and John Smith kicks him out of his office. That kick is the start of the story we are going to write, because Tim gets angry and vows that he'll sell Smith a copy of that book if it takes him a year. Now there is the story, the story of how Tim sells a book to Smith. When he makes the sale or gives it up it ends. Here we have the three requisites, the start, or beginning, which is that Smith kicks Tim out of his office; the middle, or the efforts Tim makes to sell the book; and the end, or climax, which may be either that he does sell the book or gives up his attempt.