ecial self-installed switch for the electric light is within
reach of his hand. Now, with his note-book always with him when he is
away from home, with note-books and card-indexes close at hand when he
_is_ at home, and with the means of instantly putting his thoughts on
paper if they come to him after he has gone to bed, he knows that he
is in a position to take advantage of every stray idea that may
contain a plot germ, or that may aid him in developing a story already
in course of construction.

If the beginner would only understand the importance of systematic
note-making, he would soon reduce by one-half the labor of unearthing
plots for his stories.

_4. The Borrowed Plot_

All is grist that comes to the mill of the writer who keeps a
note-book. Almost everything that he reads, sees, or hears, offers
some plot-suggestion, or suggests a better way of working out the plot
he has already partly developed. But, in taking plot-ideas from the
daily papers and writing stories suggested by the anecdotes and the
conversation of friends, proceed with great care, lest you make
trouble for yourself or for others. In a later chapter we show how
many cases of alleged plagiarism are simply the results of two people
taking the same idea from the same newspaper paragraph. The point here
made is that if you take an idea from a newspaper item there are three
courses open to you--one safe course, and two not safe. The unsafe
ways are, to recopy the story bodily, using in your story all the
facts set forth in the news item; or else to change it only enough to
insure its being "the same, yet not the same." If you adopt either of
these two foolish and dangerous methods, you are extremely likely to
find that you have either been forestalled by someone who wrote a
story on the subject before you did, or that your story, following
closely the original facts, has given offense to someone who was
concerned in the actual case. If you live in a small community, the
risk of thus offending is, of course, correspondingly greater.

The one safe way is to use the plot-germ, and _only_ the plot-germ,
taken from the item in the paper. If you can take the central idea and
remodel it so that the very reporter who wrote the original item would
not recognize it, you may legitimately claim to have produced an
original story. That is, moreover, what you _should_ do, leaving aside
all questions of your script's being accepted, and the possibility of