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brief as possible, for when the strain of the suspense is removed, the interest wanes rapidly and the effect of the. preceding scenes is speedily lost. A writer who intends to persist in this work should be- gin to collect "scrap"—clippings from newspapers and magazines of incidents that strike him as suitable ideas for photoplays, jottings of incidents that he witnesses or hears recounted, imaginary happenings that flash into his mind. All these should be kept in a scrapbook so as to be at hand when needed. These are the germs of future plots. Wil- liam T. Price, in his "Technique of the Drama," says: "Every true play fashioned under a creative hand has its germ. This germ may be a pregnant and suggestive trait in some character, a happening—of personal knowledge in life, an incident in history, a paragraph in a newspaper— in short, a dramatic idea from any source. Charles Reade admittedly sought with diligence the history of each day as the press abundantly gathered its comedies and trag- edies." To illustrate what can be done with a suggestion, we'll suppose that you have clipped from a - newspaper an ac- count of the finding of the body of a young man in the river. The article describes him as well-dressed, tells of a label on his coat and identification card in a pocket. These point to the fact that he cornes of a good family in Vir- ginia. The police state that he has been involved in a num- ber of bold robberies arid lost his life trying to escape after a burglary. Now, there you have the germ of a plot. The thing is clouded in mystery. Why should this well-bred young man become a burglar? What were his relations with his fam- ily? How are you going to lift the veil? How are you going to expand this meager account into complications, conflict, climaxes? Let us work this out together. First, what is to be the purpose of our plot? Shall we prove this to be a case of mistaken identity and clear the young Vir- 21