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CHAPTER XXIII 77 edge, do not have a steamer burning to the water edge. Get some- thing different. To the highly trained imagination a hotel fire in which scores are burned may suggest a comedy over the argument as to which member of the household shall build the morning fire or be the basis for a farce in which the janitor, the heating apparatus, a tip and a tenant are the component parts. Such a story might sell where a.blazing hotel would be undesirable. Perhaps, instead, it may be that some individual act of bravery may appeal to the author where the story as a whole may be useless and he will turn this around. Perhaps, for example, the paper tells how Mrs. O'Grady, having lit- tle Minnie Roscoe in charge, was faithful to her promise to Minnie's mother and saved the child instead of her own. 18. That does not suggest very strongly the story of Bill Brown, traveling across the desert with his wife and the girl that his chum, Dick Sprague, is to marry when they get to their camp. They lose their way. Bill and his wife deny themselves water to keep alive the girl, less used to desert hardships. At the last moment they find a waterhole surrounded by a gold mine and all ends happily. The story is not much like the story of Mrs. O'Grady, but one incident sug- gested the other and shows how press clips should be used. 19. It is the same way with other fiction and photoplay stories. Do not repeat them. Let them suggest something else to you. Many writers, when their plotting minds grow dull, read the plots of others —not to get any particular suggestion, but merely to get into the plot- ting atmosphere. They take nothing of what they have read. 20. But other story plots can do more than this. A single phrase or perhaps a paragraph will suggest a story wholly different from the one the author has written. Perhaps the author has written something that is not true to facts. The second author writes a story that is, not a paraphrase of the other story, but a new one. Perhaps it is a story ' of the stage, written by one who guesses at his facts. The man who knows gives a snort and writes a story with the proper color just to show how it should be done. 21. To give a concrete example, a well-known writer did a little story of the circus. He knew more about music than he did about "high traps," and he wrote a story of a gymnast and a bass drummer. When the bass drum banged his instrument it was the signal to the flying man to grasp the bar of the swing. Because he hated the gym- nast the drummer hit too early one night, the trapeze artist closed his hands too soon, overshot the net and broke his neck. 22. The story was recalled some years later by another writer who knew more about the circus and knew that no high-priced gymnast is going to put his life into the hands of a cheap drummer in a circus band. He knew that the work was all done by counts. He wrote a story in which the green drummer fell in love with the gymnast's wife. The stress the bandmaster had laid upon the banging of the drum as the man was about to grasp the bar led into the same error the first drummer made. He hit the drum too soon, with the only result that