Let us take up in greater detail the necessary qualities that we have enumerated. We will imagine that you have pencil and paper before you and have set out to write a photoplay. Your brain is barren of ideas, but you can’t afford to wait for an inspiration; you might sit there all day, chewing the end of your pencil, before a plot-germ would come to you out of the empty air. But there is your note-book--first aid to the power of observation--let’s see if there is anything there to jog the imagination. Turning the pages of the note-book, you see brief jottings that represent weeks of observation. Here is a note prompted by a newspaper account of a train hold up in which the lone bandit blunderingly made away with the mail-bag, leaving thousands of dollars in currency untouched. The newspapers said the laugh was on the robber, but as you read the thought flashed through your mind, “Supposing a fugitive from justice, wrongfully accused, knew that in the mail carried by this train there was a letter concerning the condition of his wife who was critically ill back East, and that he braved arrest and possible death, not for money, but because of the strength of his love?” There are possibilities in that idea, but somehow or other, as you revolve it in your mind now, your enthusiasm does not increase. For one thing, you know that newspaper accounts are dangerous bits of inspiration. Possibly fifty or a hundred other photoplay writers in all parts of the country have read the same story, followed similar lines of thought, and are about to write stories with this as the central idea. The staff writers have also seized upon it. Then, again, the only plots your imagination gives you to build around the idea are trite and ordinary. So you decide to let this plot-germ rest in the note-book until some future moment, when another jotting, or perhaps a bit of happy inspiration, will give you the material to make a strong, original story out of it. Over the pages of the note-book you go again. There are accounts of humorous little incidents that you witnessed or heard about, and which will one day furnish inspiration for comedies. There are notes concerning unusual faces, features that, to an observant eye, seem to be pregnant with stories. A two-line note may describe the odd-looking house you saw on your walk last Sunday that brought to mind visions of ghosts and goblins. This is what we mean by the power of observation. Without it you cannot hope to succeed as an author, for there is no such thing as inspiration _per se_; observation is the seed of inspiration. Cultivate this power, use your note-book, never lose a moment in search of an idea, spend your time developing the plot-germs that you have found at the best of sources--real life.