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82 TECHNIQUE OF THE PHOTOPLAY want to give the director only the really important business. Instead of all the petty details you give just the essential action and write: Jim crosses to Edith- sits- proposes. This will save you time and save the director both time and trouble. Jim has to cross the room. He has to sit beside Edith. He has to propose. Those are three essential facts. The rest are details. He need not shoot down his cuffs and he does not have to be smoking. Lose yourself as completely as you can in your story. Get interested in it and think of it as a story and not as something you have to write. Do not even think of technique. Be occu- pied only with the running plot. If your leader runs too long, let it run. If your letter threatens to go over the word limit, let it go. You can condense when you cannot do creative work. Catch the story while you are in the mood. That twenty word leader can be cut to five when the fires of genius have burned out and you are raking over the ashes of revision, but you haven't the time right now to stop and worry about a leader. The main point is to get the warm, living story down on paper. Give it every ounce that there is in you. When you have it all down on paper where it can't get away from you, then you can stand back and look at it and criticise and revise, but you must first catch your story. In the course of time you'll probably reach the point where the best means of handling a given situation will at once sug- gest itself to you and you can write a story and put it right into the mail box with a reasonably good chance of a sale, but until you reach that point you must count on revision and so you need not be too particular with your first draft. It's what the Editor sees that counts and you may change your story half a dozen times between the first draft and the last Even after it has gone and come back again you may find things to be changed. That man is hopeless who is bound to the first de- velopment of the script unless he is one of those few who either write a good story the first time or else write another one. There is a class of writer who cannot revise. He must do his best work the first time or else he will revise and work- over his script until he has taken every particle of life out of it. Stage dancers have a technical term, "elevation," that has reference to their carriage. If the dancer seems to reach down and tap the floor with his feet while floating about, instead of showing that he is springing from the floor, he is said to have good elevation.