you informed as to how long they are going to stay. In that way you
will avoid sending to a company a story with a Jamaican background
when the field-company has been moved to the Delaware Water Gap
region.

_7. Hackneyed Themes_

Here is a list of subjects no longer wanted by the editors--unless the
theme is given a decidedly new twist--because they have become
hackneyed from being done so often. Many such lists have been printed
in the various motion-picture trade-papers and the different magazines
for writers. We give the tabooed themes that have so far been listed,
and others drawn from different sources. A careful study of this list
may save you from wasting your time writing a story that has already
been done--perhaps two or three times, in one form or another--in
every studio.

(1) The brother and sister, orphaned in infancy, parted by adoption
and reunited in later life. They fall in love, only to discover the
blood relationship.

(2) The little child stolen by gypsies, and restored to her family in
later life, generally by means of a favorite song.

(3) The discharged workman who goes to do injury to his former
employer, but who performs some rescue instead and gets his job back.

(4) The poor man who attends a fashionable dinner. He conceals in his
clothing delicacies for his sick wife. A ring or other valuable is
lost. He alone of the party refuses to be searched. The valuable is
found and his story comes out.

(5) The man who assumes his brother's crime for the sake of the girl
he loves, and who, he thinks, loves the brother.

(6) The child who reunites parted parents or prevents a separation.

(7) Baby's shoes. Edison, Vitagraph, Universal and other companies
have worked out all the sentiment attached to them. Bannister Merwin,
Robert E. Coffey and other authors have reunited separated couples by
means of baby's shoes. Don't do it any more.

(8) Two suitors for the hand of a girl. They go to one of the parents
to decide, or she gives them a common task to perform. One wins by
foul means. He is found out, and she marries the other.

(9) The convict who escapes and robs an innocent man of his clothes,
thereby causing another to appear temporarily as the jail-bird.

(10) The story of the girl's name and address written on the egg which
is relegated to cold storage for twenty years, then to be discovered
by a love-lorn man who seeks out the writer, who by this time has at
least one unromantic h