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CHAPTER XXIII 75 but with each succeedmg plot written will come greater facility. In this instance as soon as the physician was suggested the remainder of the play flashed as a whole. 8. The second method of plotting is to work from a climax instead of a start. In other words, you first invent a big scene and then a reason for that scene. In the plot above you would first have thought of the drink-crazed man wrestling with a skeleton in a physician's office. Then you would have found a reason for his being there and so would have kept on working backward until you reached the start, or could have imagined the climax and then the start before filling in the middle action. 9. Or you may imagine a climax in which a girl, to save her sweet- heart from being electricuted until his mother can reach the Governor with a fresh appeal, thrusts her hand into the dynamo that is gen- erating the current that presently will be used to shock to death the man she loves. Here you have a situation that is decidedly dramatic, but you do not know what it is all about. 10. One thing is clear. The man must be innocent of the crime for which he is condemned to death. If he is not innocent, he deserves to die and he is unworthy of the sacrifice the girl makes. This, of course, requires that he shall have been convicted upon perjured evidence. Then it is required that there shall develop some turn tliat will give to the mother fresh evidence too late to reach the Governor. She can- not appeal to the Warden to delay the execution. The Warden is giv- en a certain latitude, and he has gone to the limit of this time already. That is all he can do. He cannot act as a court of appeal. There is no time to reach the Governor. Here the telephone suggests itself, and some reason must be found why the telephone may not be used. This found, it is necessary to account for the girl and her presence within the prison walls. The natural move would be to make her the daugh- ter of the warden, but generally the warden removes his family from the prison precincts before an execution, provided that they live within the walls. Some other reason must be found. A good one would be that she disguises herself as a man and gets work inside in order to be near her sweetheart even though she may not be with him, and the w^ork must be as helper to the electrician since no one else would be allowed in the dynamo room at such a time. 11. Now you are working on a regular plan. You have your start, your finish and your middle action. Perhaps from the start you devise an even better line of action leading to a wholly different climax and still have the original climax to be used later in another plot. In either of these methods you will find that you are never required to follow any hard and fast development but are at liberty to let the story wan- der where it will. If you do not like the way it travels you can go back to the point of deviation and pursue the original line, but often the new lead wall result in a better story than the one first thought of and leave you with material on your hands that can be used some other time.