IMAGINATION

THAT the prospective author should be able to spell with reason-

able accuracy and to express his thoughts in grammatical form

and clearness and force is to be understood. These are the signs of intelligence, and it requires intelligence to become a writer. But there is one even more important qualification without which it will be useless to seek to gain success as an author. This is imagination of the proper sort—. the creative imagination.

2. This is something that may be developed through study, but not acquired if it at least does not lie dormant. God alone can give imagination, and He, in His wisdom, has given to many men many minds. It would be a dire catastrophe should all men come into the world endowed with the same quality of imagination. To some men are given to understand and grasp the realization of concrete facts. Such men are fitted to be executives. They plan gigantic mergers, organize financial coups and lead the armies of finance and commerce. Others of

lesser degree of the same imaginative quality serve in these armies. None of these can think in terms of story plot. A man may be highly imaginative and yet not possess the sort of imagination that makes for the creation of new ideas for stories. The men who have formed the gigantic film companies cannot write stories to be produced. They are organizers. They can imagine and devise the details of the company and undertake its financing, but they cannot write fiction. Thomas A. Edison, himself, could imagine motion pictures, but he could not write his own scripts.

It follows, therefore, that the writer must not only have imagination but that this imagination must be of the proper sort. Creative imagination is that quality of mind which enables a person to elaborate and improve known facts and to devise new ideas and combinations of ideas. Some persons imagine themselves to be possessed of this quality when they lack it. If Uncle John tells of his trip to the World's Fair, they remember the details and write them down. This is not authorship. It is merely mechanical reproduction. They will give to their readers all that was given to them, but they will give it unchanged and unimproved. They may, perhaps, frame the story in a better choice of words than the original hero of the story, but they add nothing to the elaboration of the story. They give it no new and entertaining quality. They have memory, but no imagination.

This is where so many aspirants fail. They have good memories. They recall many stories. They feel that they are qualified for authorship. They might make excellent newspaper reporters perhaps, because of their retentive memories, but even newspaper work, supposed to favor exactness of statement, requires some imagination that the facts may be seen and presented in the most interesting and attractive light. It is not possible to determine in advance just what the quality of imagination in a person is. It cannot be said in advance that this man can and that man cannot write fiction or photoplays. He must learn through experience and effort whether or not he can. A man may give great promise and never make that promise good. Another may start more slowly because he has never cultivated his imagination and yet he may evolve into a star through slow and painstaking study and practice.

The mind must be taught to think just as the child is taught to count. The child that has learned to count from one to ten is better qualified to count to the hundred than the child who cannot but who seeks to do so. And the knowledge of hundreds leads to an understanding of thousands, and that to millions, though only the most expert mathematician can grasp even faintly the limitless possibilities of figures. It is the same with developing the plotting quality. First simple plots must be mastered, and these in turn lead on and on until the mind thinks in plot instead of plot factors or suggestions.

Imagination is creative only in that it can develop and embroider known facts. It cannot imagine new ones. We know that there may be a fourth dimension, but we cannot imagine what it is, ICnovevi-tv,

length and breadth and thickness, we can imagine in these dimensions, but we cannot imagine in the fourth because we do not know what that fourth dimension is. Even a Verne or a Wells cannot imagine the unknown, though their imaginations have been trained to a point of proficiency that enables them to imagine new and strange combinations. Mr. Wells, for instance, can bring Martians to this earth, but he cannot imagine new attributes for them. He may give them a dozen arms instead of two, but he borrows these from the octopus. They may have a hundred legs, but so has the centipede. Their bodies may be unable to withstand the lighter atmospheric pressure of this planet, but this holds good of certain deep sea creatures at the surface atmosphere. All that the most imaginative author can do is to evolve from old material new and startling combinations. We admire the new combinations and do not trouble to trace them to their source.

A score of men may see a man killed by an automobile. John Smith sees only that the man is struck and killed. Frank Jones, more imaginative, may argue a design in the supposed accident. He may imagine the happening to be a clever murder of an enemy through a knowledge of his habits of daily life. Samuel Sprague may change the thought to a duel in the air between an airplane and an airship. William Davis may see in the tragedy a baby carriage propelled by an attractive widow which knocks down a rich and crabbed old bachelor who becomes enamored of the widow through the rencontre. Starting from a common fact, each man according to his degree gives back that fact. Only Smith reports the bare occurrence. The others all change and add to get something new. Smith alone is hopeless.

The simplest form of imagination gives back the thought very slightly embroidered, as Jones held the automobile accident and merely added to that a new motive. The higher types of imagination both embroider and transform incident, gaining something new and better. Eventual success will come in precise proportion to the richness of the imagination tempered by good sense. It is not merely extravagance of the returned idea that counts. It is plausibility, as well, that is required. Anything else is untrained and unworthy. This is a point many overlook. It is not sufficient merely to be unusual. It is necessary also to be convincing. It is in this phase of imagination that the authors already cited excel. Thirty or forty years ago Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was held to be a pleasant and highly. imaginative bit of fiction. Today every imaginative feature of that story has been realized. Perpetual motion inventions are regarded as the toys of the crack brained because it is a well known fact that in all these devices the friction of the parts gradually overcomes the original force. It is known also that in theory gravity ceases at the center of the earth because there the force of the mass attraction is exerted from every point. Verne used something of this idea in his "Trip to the Moon, " but another may imagine a gigantic perpetual motion machine in the center of the earth furnishing

power for the entire world, and perhaps thousands of years from now the idea will become an accomplished fact, provided that some other force than gravity operates the machine.

Imagination is inherent, but untrained. It can be developed to think along sane and plausible lines or permitted to develop as it will without discipline or direction. One is the imagination of the story writer : the other the mind of the fool. The imagination cannot only be developed but directed in its development so that it does its work well and properly. It is important that in the early stages this be done.

The statement is frequently made that the uneducated can write as good plays as the college graduate. This is not true. Theman who does not possess a college education may, and often does, write better plays, but he must have been educated in some manner, and the more ample his education the more fully 'equipped he becomes. Nothing can be taken from the mind that has not already been placed therein. It follows that the educated mind is better developed and better stored with facts than the mind uneducated. The education does not have to be of the schoolroom or the lecture hall, but the mind must be properly stocked, just as the shelves of the storekeeper must be filled, before business can be done. No man, no matter who he may be, can evolve stories from his inner consciousness. He may be singularly inventive, and able to draw upon his imagination for elaboration, but he cannot think more than he has learned, no matter how that learning was acquired. Imagination is merely the ability to store away a fact and remove a fancy precisely as the chemist can take common brown sugar and in the electric furnace transform it into a diamond. If you cannot perform a similar operation you cannot become an author, no matter how great your eagerness nor how convincing the assurances of your friends or would-be teachers.

CHAPTER VIII

FEEDING THE IMAGINATION

0 matter how active the imagination may be, it must be kept supplied with material with which to work. We are born with

minds absolutely a blank. Imagination may be one of its qualities, but the mind contains nothing with which it may be supplied and so it is dormant. The mind must be stored with material through 'reading and observation else imagination is useless. The process of imagination is not so much a process of creation as a process of transmutation; projecting the base material of unoriginal idea into <kit q„cM

of unusual thought. There must be a supply of the baser metal or the process cannot proceed. The recording (as opposed to the imaginative) mind receives lead and gives back lead. It may melt and re, 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, but the basic fact draws to it many other factors previously received, to combine into a plot. Perhaps in 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 better comparison. The mind is saturated with incident and fact. A plot idea draws to itself a deposit of these to form a complete story.

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 wanted to know if he could not, by visiting the photoplay theaters, 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 competent author draws on plot material remembered since childhood.

This leads to the second essential fact that imagination must be supported by recollection. Recollection and not memory is the proper term, for the mind 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. It follows that recollection is a quality also to be cultivated, and, like imagination, it is developed through exercise. 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 systematic exercise.

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. Each night sit down and make a note of the happenings of the day. Write down 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.

The value of recollection over note-taking is quickly apparent once you start to plot. You do not have to stop and think or look up

material—your mind is concentrated upon the plot, and the 'assembling of the incident does not in the least interfere with this concentration. The subject of note-taking will presently be touched upon, but note-taking should be made subordinate to recollected fact and used more as an inspiration than a working tool.

Since nothing can be taken from the mind that has not been put into it, it follows that the more we know the more diversified the information we can use. Suppose that like Mr. Wells we seek to create a monstrosity. We give our imaginary Martian the head of a hare, the beak of an eagle, the body of a snake, the tentacles of the octopus, the single eye of the Cyclops and a snail like form of locomotion. These we know, therefore we can use. Did we not know of the snake we could not imagine such a body. We would have imagined something else. It is most important that we should have on hand the largest possible stock of attributes that we may outfit our celestial visitor most uniquely.

The best sources of information are reading and observation of daily life, but we can see more of life through books than through our own limited opportunities for observation, and so reading occupies a higher place. The would-be fiction writer is required to do a certain amount of reading for style. This is not demanded of the photoplay author, who is not required to possess literary style beyond that which will enable him to write with correctness and intelligence. For the photoplay writer there can be suggested no prescribed books or courses. The reading must be catholic and all-embracing. Fiction alone will not suffice. There is as much vivid incident in the newspapers as in stories and magazines. To some extent elementary works on technical subjects should be read, simple and easily understood books on surgery, on wood and metal working, on building and construction, on railroading—in fact on any subject you can acquire without undue effort and expense. It will not pay you to purchase a number of technical works, but read them if you get the chance. The encyclopedia is excellent, but do not be like the man who could talk intelligently only as far as G. Read through to Z and then read the appendix, if there is one.

Anything and everything you can get hold of is material; the catalog of a mail order house is as apt to give you a suggestion as is the Bible or the daily paper. The chances that you will obtain an idea from the catalog are fairly remote and it will not pay to make an effort to acquire one, but if you run across one read it and get an idea of the mail order business. Some day, in a western story, the recollection of the Wind River Bible will be helpful. One comedy that was received with favor was suggested by a book of instructions to ticket agents on the New York Central Railroad, and it is probable that there are more suggestions to be found at the same source. You will not find complete plots, but you will find ideas, and these ideas, combined with others, will in turn become plots.

You do not have to travel to observe life. If you are in the ten

course of the Pennsylvania Station in New York ahead of your train time, note how other people say goodbye. You may never write a story set in that station, but Jim and Millie, at a flag station in Arizona, will say good-bye in much the same way. Your young people must part. You bring in review all the partings you can recollect and select and improve the one most suitable. The setting is changed, but human nature is much the same the world over. Make life a book you are constantly reading and you will learn much.

Most advisers on writing strongly favor the taking of notes. Recollection, properly trained, is much better, but a note book can be made helpful if it is not made too complex, but those who have the note-taking habit are prone to make it complex to a point where utility becomes lost in a matter of sub-division.

A note book may range all the way from a shoebox half full of newspaper clippings and penciled memoranda to an elaborate form of loose leaf or card catalog. As a general thing the loose leaf or card form is the best, since it enables you to roughly classify your clippings and ideas, but roughly means that and not the Dewey decimal system. There is danger that you will presently develop into a cataloger instead of an author.

Not everything should be noted in the book, but only the most novel and strongly suggestive ideas. There should be a division for titles, and into this should go everything that even looks like a suggestion for a good title. Try at the time of entry to translate the old into the new. You may think of a situation wherein a man marries his own mother. If you know that this has been done before, change the suggestion to read that the young man elopes with his prospective mother-in-law when he thinks he is eloping with the girl of his choice. When you find that this, too, has been used change once. more so that the youth elopes with his pretty stepmother because his plans and hers become crossed. He saves his father disgrace and a broken home and shows her the folly of her intended action. Now through imagination you have a new plot factor.

For the reason that any idea is flexible and can be used as comedy or drama, do not classify your sheets by dramatic classification. You are too apt to lose for a comedy what you have filed under drama or vice versa. The idea as above started as drama, was turned to comedy and turned back to drama of a lighter type. This could not be done once a story was entered by class.

14. The chief value of the note book is as a suggestion maker. Each entry of any value is a plot in embryo if only you can hatch it out and by looking over the entries when inspiration flags you may freshen your thought and get the start you need. Here, rather than as a supply of detail of manners and customs, your book or catalogue will be of real value. The minor incidents should be kept so freshly in mind that you will not need to refer to memoranda.