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CHAPTER VII 19 lesser degree of the same imaginative quality serve in these armies. None of these can think in terms of story plot. A man may be highly imaginative and yet not possess the sort of imagination that makes for the creation of new ideas for stories. The men who have formed the gigantic film companies cannot write stories to be produced. They are organizers. They can imagine and devise the details of the company and undertake its financing, but they cannot write fiction. Thomas A. Edison, himself, could imagine motion pictures, but he could not write his own scripts. 3. It follows, therefore, that the writer must not only have imagi- nation but that this imagination must be of the proper sort. Creative'] imagination is that quality of mind which enables a person to elabo-| rate and improve known facts and to devise new ideas and combina-^ tions of ideas. Some persons imagine themselves to be possessed of this quality when they lack it. If Uncle John tells of his trip to the World's Fair, they remember the details and write them down. This is not authorship. It is merely mechanical reproduction. They will give to their readers all that was given to them, but they will give it unchanged and unimproved. They may, perhaps, frame the story in a better choice of words than the original hero of the story, but they« add nothing to the elaboration of the story. They give it no new and ^ entertaining quality. They have memory, but no imagination. | 4. This is where so many aspirants fail. They have good memo- ries. They recall many stories. They feel that they are qualified for authorship. They might make excellent newspaper reporters perhaps,! because of their retentive memories, but even newspaper work, sup-* posed to favor exactness of statement, requires some imagination that the facts may be seen and presented in the most interesting and at- tractive light. It is not possible to determine in advance just what the quality of imagination in a person is. It cannot be said in advance that this man can and that man can not write fiction or photoplays. He must learn through experience and effort whether or not he can. A man may give great promise and never make that promise good. Another may start more slowly because he has never cultivated his imagination and yet he may evolve into a star through slow and pains- taking study and practice. 5. The mind must be taught to think just as the child is taught to I count. The child that has learned to count from one to ten is better qualified to count to the hundred than the child who cannot but who seeks to do so. And the knowledge of hundreds leads to an under- standing of thousands, and that to millions, though only the most ex- pert mathematician can grasp even faintly the limitless possibilities of figures. It is the same with developing the plotting quality. First ^ simple plots must be mastered, and these in turn lead on and on until ' the mind thinks in plot instead of plot factors or suggestions. ' 6. Imagination is creative only in that it can develop and embroider known facjs, It cannot imagine new ones. We know that there may be a fourth dimension, but we cannot imagine what it is. Knowing