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22 FEEDING THE IMAGINATION |of unusual thought. There must be a supply of the baser metal or tlie process cannot proceed. The recording (as opposed to the imagina- tive) mind receives lead and gives back lead. It may melt and x^p fine old material and give back pigs for scrap, but it is lead still and not something better. Perhaps this simile of transmutation is not the most apt, for the process is less a transmutation than a reassembling of facts. The single fact is not taken into the brain and restored as a plot, Tut the basic fact draws to it many other factors previously j;e- ceived^ to combine into a pIotT 'Terliaps m~your earlier days you have made a mineral tree or have hung strings into saturated solutions and have watched the crystals form upon the strings. This is perhaps a I better comparison. The mind is saturated with incidei^. and faj^ A ►•plot idea draws to itself a deposit of these to form a complete story. 2. As this chapter was being written a note was received from an aspiring author who stated that he had a good plot but that he could think of no minor action with which to tell it. He w^anted to know if he could not, by visiting the photoplay theatres, acquire sufficient material from what he saw on the screen with which to complete his story. He was told that this material should already be existent in his brain, and that if he could not call up the incident and by-play, either the plot really was no plot or else he was no author. A com- petent author draws on plot material remembered since childhood. 3. This leads to the second essential fact that imagination must be supp orted by recoll ection. Recollection and not memory is the proper term, tor" the min? never fails to remember what it receives, but the person may be unable to recollect what he has heard and remembered. The brain stores each isolated fact within its cells. Recollection is the key which opens these cell doors. Il; follows that recollection is a I quality also to be cultivated, and, like imagination, it is developed through e-xerpi^. There are many advertised memory-systems, so called, most of which are dependent upon recollection through the association of ideas. There is only one good way and it requires no "system" and no course of instruction. It is merely exercise, but sys- tematic exercise. I 4. Take a book of facts, not figures. Read a page once. Set it (aside and write down as many facts as you can recall. Do this with another page and another, but perform this study regularly, ^ftfel* night s it down and m ake a note o f the happenings of the dav. Write ^owii all that has occurred. At first you will do well to turn out a dozen or a score of facts. In time you can record correctly the entire doings of the day. After you have done this for a while, lay aside your daily notes and on Sunday see how many of the facts you can call to mind without reference to your notes for the week. In time you will become so used to recollecting things that the incident of ten years ago that will work well with the plot of the moment will present itself without waiting to be called up. / 5. The value of recollection over note-taking is quickly apparent Jonce you start to plot. You do not have to stop and think or look up