Plot material is useless unless it is stored in sufficient quantities to enable the consulting plot seeker to make use of it without being cramped in his selection. Photoplaywriting is too arduous labor to resort to slip-shod methods such as trying to remember items of plot material. It is part of the author’s business to store up energy and ideas. The application of a simple system, along the line of that which follows, will permit the playwright to catalog, classify and file all of his plot material (notes, clippings, pictures, etc.) in a manner that will enable him to file or find any conceivable item instantaneously.
(EXAMPLE 52.) This classified plot directory and catalog is elastic and universal. The ambitious student may readily carry it to completion along the lines indicated. There are easily a thousand sub-divisions possible. There are 7 grand divisions: (I) The Heart of Man; (II) The Ambition of Man; (III) The Flesh of Man; (IV) The Soul of Man; (V) The Mind of Man; (VI) Not-Man; (VII) Humor. We will divide but one of these grand divisions: (I) THE HEART OF MAN—(1) Man; (2) Woman; (3) Love; (4) Marriage; (5) Children; (6) Family; (7) Home; (8) Friendship; (9) Separation; (10) Re-union. The sub-divisions of (4) Marriage: (a) Name; (b) Money; (c) Bigamy; (d) Deception; (e) Beauty; (f) Blunder; (g) Runaway; (h) Miscegenation; (i) Morganatic; (j) Eugenics.
A final suggestion as a source of plot material (as well as a harvesting of titles for plays and stories) is a persistent search for, and a diligent setting down for future use, of happy phrases, which may be heard, read or conceived by the playwright. He will find that a large percentage of these phrase-titles are the nucleus of plots in themselves. In most cases they suggest the coveted big story.
(EXAMPLE 53.) The Tides of Fate; When a Man Cannot Pay; Give Him a Chance; Somebody Had to Do It; To Those That Have; Who Live in the Past; The Quality of Youth; For A’ That; For Good and All; One Chance in a Hundred.
Plot material is the stuff that souls are made of; it is the composition from which careers are moulded; it is sparks from the forge of nobility and salt distilled from the tears of humanity. Plot material means a record of man’s activities outside of the four dull walls of Convention and beyond the dominion of the Commonplace.
The great principle that governs the construction, outcome and solution of all organizations, plans and plots, is the ever-conscious FOREKNOWLEDGE AND FORESHADOWING of the objective mission, the sum of all the parts and the decisive action.
CHAPTER III
Beginning With the End
SEEKING THE CLIMAX; WHEN TO BEGIN THE PHOTOPLAY; EVER-FORWARD MOVEMENT; THE LIVE BEGINNING.
THE great question in the minds of the audience is, What will be the outcome of it all? Audiences generally take all beginnings of plays for granted. No ambitious playwright, however, can afford to take and employ plot beginnings as a mere matter of chance. Every particle employed in the building of a plot is the part of a conscious, pre-arranged design—most especially the beginning.