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PLOT FORMATION 71 Both stories have the same master plot as have other stories dating back through the centuries. When a story is returned by an editor with the statement that it lacks originality, he does not mean that he demands some- thing absolutely new, 'but that he does require a greater freshness of treatment than has been shown. Perhaps the greatest trouble that the beginner has is to determine between the old and the new. A story seems fresh to him because he has not seen it, yet it may have been done on the screen scores of times and in manuscript hundreds of times. It may even be a true story; something that happened to you or some friend and yet have found its parallel elsewhere. The fact that once, when Uncle George was away from home, Aunt Emma thought that bur- glars were in the house and found that it was only the cat, does not make it impossible that there sho.uld have been other Aunt Emmas and Uncle Georges and other cats. Ninety per cent, of the stories sent into the studio are worth- less because they possess no originality, and this applies to true stories as well as to the creations of your imagination. Most experienced writers avoid the true story as they would the pest ; not only because it is apt to be not new, but because the pos- session of established facts limits the imagination. You try to stick to the points of the real story and your imagination is cramped. Before you cut your literary teeth there are going to be a lot of old stories that you are going to write because it would seem that every writer must do them at least once. Probably the favorite plot of the novice, is the one in which the workman (generally he is a drunken workman) loses his job and goes to kill his employer. As he steals through the shrubbery he sees <that the house is afire, or that burglars are about to break in, or someone is stealing the employer's little child or the child is about to be bitten by a mad dog. Whatever it is, he fixes it up and gets a vote of thanks and his job back. That story has been written thousands of times and was run on the screen about every three months until the public tired of it. Then there's the little child that is stolen by the gypsies. Twenty years later mother hears a street beggar singing. "My God! My daughter's voice!" It is a certainty that you'll write one about the little grandchild that wins its grandparents' forgiveness for a runaway match. Write it, since you must, but do not waste postage on it. If all the little grandchildren that "squared" mother or father, and the others that kept mamma and papa from getting divorces, were to march in single file, the procession would take three days to pass a given point.