We urge this clear identification of characters so that your spectators may be saved the annoyance of needless speculation, and be able to yield to the play their instant attention and sympathetic interest.  Furthermore, this course will enable you to tell your story and develop your plot with much greater ease, since the onlookers, understanding who everybody is, and how they are disposed towards each other, will grasp the points of the plot more quickly.  Remember that the motives actuating the different characters are virtually sure to be the very foundations of a photoplay plot.

Almost everyone has sat half through a photoplay which was perfect in all other respects, but far from pleasing because it left the spectators guessing for minutes as to “who’s who.”

“Keep your first characters on the screen, even though in different scenes, long enough to get everyone familiar with them and their environment in the story before introducing a new and unexpected phase in the tale.  To fail in this is faulty construction."[16]

[Footnote 16:  Herbert Case Hoagland:  How to Write a Photoplay.]

3.  Prompt Beginning of the Action

A common mistake among amateur photoplaywrights is to waste far too much time on preliminaries.  If a guest is expected from a distant city, all that is necessary, as a rule, is to write in a short letter, which is opened and read by the host- or hostess-to-be, announcing that the guest will arrive at a certain time.  But the young writer—­to judge from many scripts we have examined—­thinks that in such a case it is necessary to show the housemaid preparing the guest-chamber, another scene in which the hostess instructs the chauffeur to be ready at such an hour to meet her guest at the station, and so on.  No matter what kind of story you are writing, go straight to the point from the opening—­make the wheels of the plot actually commence to revolve in the first scene—­plunge into your action, don’t wade timidly in inch by inch.  To use up two or three scenes in showing trivial incidents which may happen to the characters while they are, so to speak, standing in the wings ready to make their entrances, is as tiresome as it is useless.  If the hero of the Western story makes his first appearance by dashing into the scene madly pursued by a band of Indians, the spectator is not interested in finding out what he was doing at the time he first discovered the red men closing in upon him; it is how he will escape them that engages their whole attention.  Once get your action started vividly and the interest of the spectators will permit you to give all the really necessary foundation information as you move on with your story.

4.  Sequence in the Action

Apply the same rule of directness to the introduction of new characters in the scenes that follow.  There is one main theme, one main line of development, in every well constructed story—­and only one.  See to it that you do not digress from it except as you bring up from the rear other essential parts of the action.  There is absolutely no place in the photoplay for side trips.