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Piyes Yazma Sanatı
Yıllardır ortalarda gezen oyun yazma kitapları arasında, oyun kurgusunun sırlarını analiz etmeye girişmiş çok az sayıda eser vardır. Lajos Egri'nin artık klasikleşmiş kitabı Piyes Yazma Sanatı bu işlevi görür. Egri, bu kitabında ele aldığı görüşlerin ve piyes yazma tekniğiyle ilgili eleştirilerinin, kısa hikaye, roman ve senaryolar için de geçerli olduğunu özellikle vurgulamıştır.
328 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1942
About the author
Lajos Egri
10 books55 followersLajos N. Egri (born June 4, 1888; died February 7, 1967) was the author of The Art of Dramatic Writing, which is widely regarded as one of the best works on the subject of playwriting, though its teachings have since been adapted for the writing of short stories, novels, and screenplays[...]
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 299 reviews
September 19, 2014
I was introduced to this book by Paul Schrader (TAXI DRIVER) when I tried, unsuccessfully, to enroll in a screenwriting course he was teaching one quarter at UCLA Film School. About 50 students crammed into a room meant to accommodate ten, and the first thing he said was: "I'm not admitting any undergrads into this class. (I was an undergrad, so I was already out in the first five minutes.) However, I'm going to tell you a few things if you ARE an undergrad film student.
"First, if you want to write, you shouldn't be majoring in film. Go study history or literature or psychology...something that will actually give you something to write about later. Second, in my experience, the people who make it as screenwriters aren't the ones who want to make it. Everyone WANTS to be a screenwriter. You get to work at home in your pajamas, ride to the airport in limousines, fly first class and hang out on sets with incredibly interesting people. Who wouldn't want that? But the people who make it as screenwriters aren't the people who want to make it; they're the people who HAVE to make it. Third, if you want to be a screenwriter, go buy THE ART OF DRAMATIC WRITING by Lajos Egri. It's the best book on dramatic writing I've ever read."
That was...well, a long time ago, but his advice still holds true. I went out and immediately bought the book and inhaled it. It must have had some positive effect, because looking back years later, I realized I was the only one in my class who became a working screenwriter. I owe a lot of that success to Egri's book.
Much of the book may feel dated, and I have to admit I lost my copy and haven't looked at it in years. But I got two big, incredibly important takeaways from the book:
1. He has an entire chapter devoted to character biographies, including a very robust template for creating them. I began using this template before I even graduated, and have been using it ever since, first in scripts and now in books. Working from his template forces you to think about character attributes -- family life, parental relationships, schooling, physical characteristics and issues, psychological makeup -- that might otherwise get short shrift in the planning stage. Not only is it important when it comes to creating characters that come alive on the page, it also brings up ideas and possibilities that might otherwise never have occurred to you.
2. The second key piece in the book is THE PREMISE. Egri is an advocate of an ACTIVE PREMISE...i.e., theme. Things like: "Willful apathy leads to slavery." "Arrogance leads to ruin." "Hatred leads to destruction / isolation / misery (take your pick)."
His point was: make sure you have a point. You should be trying to prove something, anything, with your story. Not, "Loneliness sucks," but "Aloofness leads to loneliness." (Never mind whether these premises are trite.) I once read how Arthur Miller would work incredibly hard at nailing down his premise, so he knew exactly what he was trying to say. Then he would type out the premise and tape it onto his typewriter, so that every day when he sat down to write, he was reminded of what his premise was so he didn't stray off into tangents.
If you want to be a professional writer, this is an absolute MUST HAVE book. If you take nothing else from it, read the chapters on biographies and Premise, breath them in and make them a part of your creative process. It will save you a world of hurt and elevate your writing above 95% of the work out there.
"First, if you want to write, you shouldn't be majoring in film. Go study history or literature or psychology...something that will actually give you something to write about later. Second, in my experience, the people who make it as screenwriters aren't the ones who want to make it. Everyone WANTS to be a screenwriter. You get to work at home in your pajamas, ride to the airport in limousines, fly first class and hang out on sets with incredibly interesting people. Who wouldn't want that? But the people who make it as screenwriters aren't the people who want to make it; they're the people who HAVE to make it. Third, if you want to be a screenwriter, go buy THE ART OF DRAMATIC WRITING by Lajos Egri. It's the best book on dramatic writing I've ever read."
That was...well, a long time ago, but his advice still holds true. I went out and immediately bought the book and inhaled it. It must have had some positive effect, because looking back years later, I realized I was the only one in my class who became a working screenwriter. I owe a lot of that success to Egri's book.
Much of the book may feel dated, and I have to admit I lost my copy and haven't looked at it in years. But I got two big, incredibly important takeaways from the book:
1. He has an entire chapter devoted to character biographies, including a very robust template for creating them. I began using this template before I even graduated, and have been using it ever since, first in scripts and now in books. Working from his template forces you to think about character attributes -- family life, parental relationships, schooling, physical characteristics and issues, psychological makeup -- that might otherwise get short shrift in the planning stage. Not only is it important when it comes to creating characters that come alive on the page, it also brings up ideas and possibilities that might otherwise never have occurred to you.
2. The second key piece in the book is THE PREMISE. Egri is an advocate of an ACTIVE PREMISE...i.e., theme. Things like: "Willful apathy leads to slavery." "Arrogance leads to ruin." "Hatred leads to destruction / isolation / misery (take your pick)."
His point was: make sure you have a point. You should be trying to prove something, anything, with your story. Not, "Loneliness sucks," but "Aloofness leads to loneliness." (Never mind whether these premises are trite.) I once read how Arthur Miller would work incredibly hard at nailing down his premise, so he knew exactly what he was trying to say. Then he would type out the premise and tape it onto his typewriter, so that every day when he sat down to write, he was reminded of what his premise was so he didn't stray off into tangents.
If you want to be a professional writer, this is an absolute MUST HAVE book. If you take nothing else from it, read the chapters on biographies and Premise, breath them in and make them a part of your creative process. It will save you a world of hurt and elevate your writing above 95% of the work out there.
April 2, 2011
After reading this incredibly insightful, incredibly lucid book, I really feel that it's a crime that (1) so few people have read this book, and (2) there are so many bad plays (novels, etc.) out there. And it's not even hard to understand! I didn't have to struggle to comprehend the advice or see why it works.
Lest you think I'm overstating the value of the work, I shall explain it to you in three easy steps.
1. What premise are you trying to prove? (This is not theme or plot summary, but the plot should be obvious from it. For example, in "Romeo and Juliet," the premise is "Great love defies even death." "Macbeth": "Ruthless ambition leads to destruction.)
2. Find characters who, because of their very nature, must inevitably be led to choices that will prove the premise. (In a delicious twist, Egri illustrates this point by asking you to imagine what would have happened if Hamlet, the brooding Dane, had fallen in love with Juliet. By the time he got done soliloquizing, she'd have been married off to Paris and all that would be left to him was still more brooding and cursing his fate. Yet in his own play, his tenacity in uncovering his father's murderer fit perfectly.)
3. Fill your plot with conflict that exposes the characters' nature, so that in the end the reader will understand your premise and your characters.
Naturally, I'm leaving a lot out that is worth reading. Egri writes in a direct, instructional style that has lost favor to conversational style, but is eminently readable. The first half of the book, on premise and character, is directly applicable to all forms of dramatic writing (novel, short story, theater, television, film, even comic book), and it doesn't matter that this book was originally entitled "How to Write a Play" and as such, takes its examples from theater. The second half, on conflict and general writing advice, is still entirely valuable and still applies to non-theater writing, but must be synthesized before it can be applied to other media where dialogue is not the primary method of communicating to the reader.
Once you've read this book, you are completely without excuse if you write something boring or nonsensical. You'll also wonder why no one's ever explained drama to you so clearly before. Then you'll wonder why you haven't heard of the book when it was first published in 1938! That's pre-WWII, people. And a lot of lousy drama has been written since then. Dont' let yours be another.
Lest you think I'm overstating the value of the work, I shall explain it to you in three easy steps.
1. What premise are you trying to prove? (This is not theme or plot summary, but the plot should be obvious from it. For example, in "Romeo and Juliet," the premise is "Great love defies even death." "Macbeth": "Ruthless ambition leads to destruction.)
2. Find characters who, because of their very nature, must inevitably be led to choices that will prove the premise. (In a delicious twist, Egri illustrates this point by asking you to imagine what would have happened if Hamlet, the brooding Dane, had fallen in love with Juliet. By the time he got done soliloquizing, she'd have been married off to Paris and all that would be left to him was still more brooding and cursing his fate. Yet in his own play, his tenacity in uncovering his father's murderer fit perfectly.)
3. Fill your plot with conflict that exposes the characters' nature, so that in the end the reader will understand your premise and your characters.
Naturally, I'm leaving a lot out that is worth reading. Egri writes in a direct, instructional style that has lost favor to conversational style, but is eminently readable. The first half of the book, on premise and character, is directly applicable to all forms of dramatic writing (novel, short story, theater, television, film, even comic book), and it doesn't matter that this book was originally entitled "How to Write a Play" and as such, takes its examples from theater. The second half, on conflict and general writing advice, is still entirely valuable and still applies to non-theater writing, but must be synthesized before it can be applied to other media where dialogue is not the primary method of communicating to the reader.
Once you've read this book, you are completely without excuse if you write something boring or nonsensical. You'll also wonder why no one's ever explained drama to you so clearly before. Then you'll wonder why you haven't heard of the book when it was first published in 1938! That's pre-WWII, people. And a lot of lousy drama has been written since then. Dont' let yours be another.
November 3, 2011
If there is one book I cite more than Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, it is Lajos Egri's relatively obscure gem. I happened upon it thanks to a writer-friend of a writer-friend who took one of James Frey's (no, not that James Frey, may his plagiarizing soul fly to a million little pieces) master classes in fiction. And yes, Egri will help you write a damn good novel.
The key is unity. Out of necessity, teachers of writing split the art of fiction writing into about five elements: character, plot, voice, setting, and theme (a.k.a. premise, in Egri's vocabulary). Yet any writer who has been learning the craft for more than a few years will begin to intuit the problem with this approach. The problem is the same one you have if you go to your kitchen, say, and set a stick of butter, a bag of chocolate chips, an egg, a cup of sugar, and a cup of flour next to one another. They don't turn into a tray of chocolate chip cookies. Likewise, writers must consider the elements of the novel in relation to one another, because the decisions we make about any one element has important ripples in all the others.
If this insight happens to strike for the first time while you're revising a complete manuscript, you will probably feel like you're wrestling with a ball of tar. Any positive change in one direction undermines some part of the story somewhere else. For example, say you realize that you're a natural at writing in first person. So you change the manuscript to first person. But the problem is that your protagonist is an aloof computer genius for the CIA. Her POV doesn't sound right in first person, so... Congratulations. You've just discovered the unified nature of fiction.
Lajos Egri has a solution. The trick is to plan first, write second. He divides the story-building process into three parts: (1) premise (a.k.a. theme), (2) character, (3) conflict. That is, first, decide on your theme: the meaningful emotional arc that organizes the story. Second, pick the very best character to embody that arc. Third, pick the very best conflicts to throw at that character, to allow him to naturally enact the theme. Egri provides many, many examples drawn from theater (the book is written for playwrights) that soon make this process seem intuitive.
The key is unity. Out of necessity, teachers of writing split the art of fiction writing into about five elements: character, plot, voice, setting, and theme (a.k.a. premise, in Egri's vocabulary). Yet any writer who has been learning the craft for more than a few years will begin to intuit the problem with this approach. The problem is the same one you have if you go to your kitchen, say, and set a stick of butter, a bag of chocolate chips, an egg, a cup of sugar, and a cup of flour next to one another. They don't turn into a tray of chocolate chip cookies. Likewise, writers must consider the elements of the novel in relation to one another, because the decisions we make about any one element has important ripples in all the others.
If this insight happens to strike for the first time while you're revising a complete manuscript, you will probably feel like you're wrestling with a ball of tar. Any positive change in one direction undermines some part of the story somewhere else. For example, say you realize that you're a natural at writing in first person. So you change the manuscript to first person. But the problem is that your protagonist is an aloof computer genius for the CIA. Her POV doesn't sound right in first person, so... Congratulations. You've just discovered the unified nature of fiction.
Lajos Egri has a solution. The trick is to plan first, write second. He divides the story-building process into three parts: (1) premise (a.k.a. theme), (2) character, (3) conflict. That is, first, decide on your theme: the meaningful emotional arc that organizes the story. Second, pick the very best character to embody that arc. Third, pick the very best conflicts to throw at that character, to allow him to naturally enact the theme. Egri provides many, many examples drawn from theater (the book is written for playwrights) that soon make this process seem intuitive.
June 19, 2015
In some ways this is a very basic book. But sometimes it is good to be reminded of the simple principles that make book or a play interesting. Good writing may be complex in that it can be read again and again providing newer levels of meaning with each reading. But it need not be complicated. A great book can weave it's complexity around a simple premise. Jealousy ultimately destroy the lover and the beloved may be what Othello is about but the play is so much richer than that, don't you think? Sometimes it is good to remember the few literary formulas that never cease to work as long as we remember, when reading or writing, that these are but the skeleton to which we will give our flesh and blood and sometimes, if we are blessed enough, our soul,
June 28, 2019
This segment is for filmmakers or readers in general who would like to skip some reading. I am collecting books that are no fun to read and stating the essence of it here also telling you why you needn’t read it. This time the book is Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its basis in the creative interpretation of human motives.
Why you needn’t read the whole book: It is boring. The writing is crap for a book that is telling us how to write a play. It is redundant. The style and format suck. So i will just tell you what the book says that might be useful so that you don’t have to go through the poorly edited 134 pages. I am not joking. There are even spelling mistakes!
Also, this is a very old book so sexism is all over it. It’s annoying to any sensible person trying to learn something trudging through sexism – however great the book is supposed to be.
1. Human character is the basis of everything
This is one lesson that the author gives again and again.
2. The most important thing you need to start writing is a premise.
Again something he says over and over again till we feel like murdering the person who coined the word itself.
About Premise
1. You need to practise penning down the premise. ‘Every good play (or film) should have a well-formulated premise. There may be more than one way to phrase the premise, but however it is phrased the thought must be the same,’ he says. (Paranthetical is mine)
2. This premise is not that difficult to arrive at even though it might sound that way from some examples. For example, ‘bragging leads to humiliation’ is a premise and it sounds stupid. But your story has to have a premise like this.
3. One way to deal with this problem is to understand that the premise has three parts.
a) Character
b) Conflict
c) End
So in the example of ‘bragging leads to humiliation,’ the ‘bragging’ is character, ‘leads to’ is conflict and ‘humiliation’ is the end.
4. There can only be one premise.
About character
1. All characters should have three dimensions
a) Physiology
b) Sociology
c) Psychology
In other words, the physical attributes of a character, the social setting, upbringing influences a character and justifies their actions. The combined effect of these two will reflect in their psychology and that will influence the character a great deal as well.
Throughout the book we are told that the author’s approach is dialectical. I would call it boring but yes, like the book says, this is a method by which something is said, written or done by following the following approach: All movement is comprised of these three steps
‘First, statement of the proposition, called thesis. Then the discovery of a contradiction to this proposition, called antithesis, being the opposite of the original proposition. Now, resolution of this contradiction necessitates the correction of the original proposition, and formulation of a third proposition, the synthesis, being the combination of the original proposition and the contradiction to it.’
It is basically what we want our (Facebook) arguments to be but they never are.
2. All characters should grow
I call it an arc. Egri says, ‘There is only one realm in which characters defy natural laws and remain the same – the realm of bad writing’ I agree. Thanks.
3. This change or arc should match the physiology, sociology and psychology of the characters.
4. These things can be learned through observation or by observing those who have observed before you – which is why we need to read great books by great authors, watch great films by great filmmakers etc. We are observing them to see what they observed and how.
5. Everything – plot, conflict etc. stem from character and all of this should in the end prove the premise.
6. You need to have a pivotal character – also called ‘protagonist’. This person must be the one with the highest stakes. (He says that in A Doll’s House Krogstad is the pivotal character and i vehemently disagree. It is Dora.)
7. Characters should be well orchestrated. That is, they should not all be the same type. ‘If all character are the same type – for instance, if all of them are bullies – it will be like an orchestra of nothing but drums,’ says Egri. Orchestration is having contrasts in characters of your play or film.
8. Even if characters are well orchestrated, they need to have ‘unity of opposites’. It means that both or all characters should have conviction and should not give up on their ideals mid-way. ‘The real unity of opposites is one in which compromise is impossible,’ he says. Unity of opposites is when opposites – for example, the hero and the villain are united by their will. This unity can only be broken by death of the dominant quality in one of the characters. For example, if we have a rational person and a superstitious one in a film or a story or a play, one has to succeed and the other fail.
About conflict
1. Action cannot happen by itself. It is a result of factors that cause it. ‘We cannot find action in a pure, isolated form, although it is always present as the result of other conditions. It is safe to say, we conclude, that the action is not more important than the contributing factors which give rise to it.’
2. Conflict is of four types.
a) Static
b) Jumping
c) Slowly rising
d) Foreshadowing
The names mean just what they say.
Static is when a character makes a decision but lacks the strength to carry it through
Jumping is when the person decides something all of a sudden provoked by almost nothing
‘Rising conflict means a clear-cut premise and unity of opposites, with three-dimensional characters.
‘Every rising conflict should be foreshadowed first by the determined forces lined up against each other.’
3. It is possible that we do things upon impulse in real life but in fiction, we have to fully justify it using tools used in fiction – like the rising conflict.
4. Conflict springs from character. To quote, ‘…if we wish to know the structure of conflict, we must first know character. But since character is influenced by environment, we must know that, too. It might seem that conflict springs spontaneously from one single cause, but this is not true. A complexity of many reasons makes one solitary conflict.’
5. ‘…if you foreshadow conflict you’re promising the very substance of existence.’ – which is why we should do it, is what he means. ‘Since most of us play possum and hide our true selves from the world, we are interested in witnessing the things happening to those who are forced to reveal their true characters under the stress of conflict. Foreshadowing conflict is not conflict yet, but we are eagerly waiting for the fulfilment of the promise of it. In conflict we are forced to reveal ourselves. It seems that self-revelation of others or ourselves holds a fatal fascination for everyone.’
6. The point of attack – this can be called the inciting incident for screenplay writers – it has to come at the right place. ‘A good point of attack is where something vital is at stake at the very beginning of a play.’
7. Even though transitions happen in seconds in real life, in fiction, it is necessary to make it smooth so the audience can see and understand it. ‘The author has to take all the steps which lead to the conclusion, whether that conflict happened in just that way or in the person’s mind.’
Regarding dialogues
1. ‘…every line of your play, every move your characters make, must further the premise.’
2. In life, people quarrel year in, year out, without once deciding to remove the factor which causes the trouble. In drama this must be condensed to the essentials, giving the illusion of years of bickering without the superfluous dialogue.
3. ‘Only a rising conflict will produce healthy dialogue.’
4. He gives a couple of good examples of good dialogue and how it is achieved.
About Shakespeare, ‘The sentences in his philosophical passages are weighty and measured; in his loves scenes lines are lyrical and flow easily. Then, with the mounting of action, sentences become shorter and simpler, so that not only the sentence content, but the word and syllable content, vary with the development of the play.’
‘The dialectical method does not rob the playwright of his creative privilege.’ I agree with this. A lot of people say that this approach just limits. Especially film school people hold the opinion that anything with structure is death. I disagree. ‘Once your characters have been set in motion, their path and their speech are determined, to a great extent; but the choice of character is completely your own. Consider, therefore, the idiom your people will employ, and their voices, and methods or delivery. Think of their personalities, and backgrounds, and the influence of these on their speech. Orchestrate your characters, and their dialogue will take care of itself. When you laugh at The Bear, remember that Chekhov gained his bombast and ridiculous dignity from a bombastic character played against a ridiculously dignified one. And in Riders to the Sea, John Millingyon Synge sways us to the tragic yet lovely rhythm of people who employ harmonious rhythms which are not identical. Maurya, Nora, Cathleen, and Bartley all use the accent of the Aran Islanders. But Bartley is swaggering, Cathleen patient, Nora quick with youth, and Mauraya slow with age. The combination is one of the most beautiful in English.’
5. ‘The dialogue must stem from the character, not the author.’
Genius
‘The extraordinary mental power of a genius is not necessarily strong enough to create his success. First, one must have a start, an opportunity to deepen one’s knowledge in a chosen profession. A genius has the ability to work at something longer and with more patience than any other man.’
Something to practise while narrating your story
‘If you must read your work to someone, ask that person to tell you the moment he begins to feel tired or bored.’
‘A play should start with the first line uttered’. In films, it should start with the first frame and first sound.
‘…”exposition” should proceed constantly, without interruption, to the very end of the play.’ – cramming information into dialogues in patches here and there will not work. Audience should understand what you are exposing in the flow of the film/play.
Egri says that the ‘obligatory scene’ is not really a thing. It just means a scene that will prove your premise the best – and by its nature, it has to be there in all work of fiction.
Why you needn’t read the whole book: It is boring. The writing is crap for a book that is telling us how to write a play. It is redundant. The style and format suck. So i will just tell you what the book says that might be useful so that you don’t have to go through the poorly edited 134 pages. I am not joking. There are even spelling mistakes!
Also, this is a very old book so sexism is all over it. It’s annoying to any sensible person trying to learn something trudging through sexism – however great the book is supposed to be.
1. Human character is the basis of everything
This is one lesson that the author gives again and again.
2. The most important thing you need to start writing is a premise.
Again something he says over and over again till we feel like murdering the person who coined the word itself.
About Premise
1. You need to practise penning down the premise. ‘Every good play (or film) should have a well-formulated premise. There may be more than one way to phrase the premise, but however it is phrased the thought must be the same,’ he says. (Paranthetical is mine)
2. This premise is not that difficult to arrive at even though it might sound that way from some examples. For example, ‘bragging leads to humiliation’ is a premise and it sounds stupid. But your story has to have a premise like this.
3. One way to deal with this problem is to understand that the premise has three parts.
a) Character
b) Conflict
c) End
So in the example of ‘bragging leads to humiliation,’ the ‘bragging’ is character, ‘leads to’ is conflict and ‘humiliation’ is the end.
4. There can only be one premise.
About character
1. All characters should have three dimensions
a) Physiology
b) Sociology
c) Psychology
In other words, the physical attributes of a character, the social setting, upbringing influences a character and justifies their actions. The combined effect of these two will reflect in their psychology and that will influence the character a great deal as well.
Throughout the book we are told that the author’s approach is dialectical. I would call it boring but yes, like the book says, this is a method by which something is said, written or done by following the following approach: All movement is comprised of these three steps
‘First, statement of the proposition, called thesis. Then the discovery of a contradiction to this proposition, called antithesis, being the opposite of the original proposition. Now, resolution of this contradiction necessitates the correction of the original proposition, and formulation of a third proposition, the synthesis, being the combination of the original proposition and the contradiction to it.’
It is basically what we want our (Facebook) arguments to be but they never are.
2. All characters should grow
I call it an arc. Egri says, ‘There is only one realm in which characters defy natural laws and remain the same – the realm of bad writing’ I agree. Thanks.
3. This change or arc should match the physiology, sociology and psychology of the characters.
4. These things can be learned through observation or by observing those who have observed before you – which is why we need to read great books by great authors, watch great films by great filmmakers etc. We are observing them to see what they observed and how.
5. Everything – plot, conflict etc. stem from character and all of this should in the end prove the premise.
6. You need to have a pivotal character – also called ‘protagonist’. This person must be the one with the highest stakes. (He says that in A Doll’s House Krogstad is the pivotal character and i vehemently disagree. It is Dora.)
7. Characters should be well orchestrated. That is, they should not all be the same type. ‘If all character are the same type – for instance, if all of them are bullies – it will be like an orchestra of nothing but drums,’ says Egri. Orchestration is having contrasts in characters of your play or film.
8. Even if characters are well orchestrated, they need to have ‘unity of opposites’. It means that both or all characters should have conviction and should not give up on their ideals mid-way. ‘The real unity of opposites is one in which compromise is impossible,’ he says. Unity of opposites is when opposites – for example, the hero and the villain are united by their will. This unity can only be broken by death of the dominant quality in one of the characters. For example, if we have a rational person and a superstitious one in a film or a story or a play, one has to succeed and the other fail.
About conflict
1. Action cannot happen by itself. It is a result of factors that cause it. ‘We cannot find action in a pure, isolated form, although it is always present as the result of other conditions. It is safe to say, we conclude, that the action is not more important than the contributing factors which give rise to it.’
2. Conflict is of four types.
a) Static
b) Jumping
c) Slowly rising
d) Foreshadowing
The names mean just what they say.
Static is when a character makes a decision but lacks the strength to carry it through
Jumping is when the person decides something all of a sudden provoked by almost nothing
‘Rising conflict means a clear-cut premise and unity of opposites, with three-dimensional characters.
‘Every rising conflict should be foreshadowed first by the determined forces lined up against each other.’
3. It is possible that we do things upon impulse in real life but in fiction, we have to fully justify it using tools used in fiction – like the rising conflict.
4. Conflict springs from character. To quote, ‘…if we wish to know the structure of conflict, we must first know character. But since character is influenced by environment, we must know that, too. It might seem that conflict springs spontaneously from one single cause, but this is not true. A complexity of many reasons makes one solitary conflict.’
5. ‘…if you foreshadow conflict you’re promising the very substance of existence.’ – which is why we should do it, is what he means. ‘Since most of us play possum and hide our true selves from the world, we are interested in witnessing the things happening to those who are forced to reveal their true characters under the stress of conflict. Foreshadowing conflict is not conflict yet, but we are eagerly waiting for the fulfilment of the promise of it. In conflict we are forced to reveal ourselves. It seems that self-revelation of others or ourselves holds a fatal fascination for everyone.’
6. The point of attack – this can be called the inciting incident for screenplay writers – it has to come at the right place. ‘A good point of attack is where something vital is at stake at the very beginning of a play.’
7. Even though transitions happen in seconds in real life, in fiction, it is necessary to make it smooth so the audience can see and understand it. ‘The author has to take all the steps which lead to the conclusion, whether that conflict happened in just that way or in the person’s mind.’
Regarding dialogues
1. ‘…every line of your play, every move your characters make, must further the premise.’
2. In life, people quarrel year in, year out, without once deciding to remove the factor which causes the trouble. In drama this must be condensed to the essentials, giving the illusion of years of bickering without the superfluous dialogue.
3. ‘Only a rising conflict will produce healthy dialogue.’
4. He gives a couple of good examples of good dialogue and how it is achieved.
About Shakespeare, ‘The sentences in his philosophical passages are weighty and measured; in his loves scenes lines are lyrical and flow easily. Then, with the mounting of action, sentences become shorter and simpler, so that not only the sentence content, but the word and syllable content, vary with the development of the play.’
‘The dialectical method does not rob the playwright of his creative privilege.’ I agree with this. A lot of people say that this approach just limits. Especially film school people hold the opinion that anything with structure is death. I disagree. ‘Once your characters have been set in motion, their path and their speech are determined, to a great extent; but the choice of character is completely your own. Consider, therefore, the idiom your people will employ, and their voices, and methods or delivery. Think of their personalities, and backgrounds, and the influence of these on their speech. Orchestrate your characters, and their dialogue will take care of itself. When you laugh at The Bear, remember that Chekhov gained his bombast and ridiculous dignity from a bombastic character played against a ridiculously dignified one. And in Riders to the Sea, John Millingyon Synge sways us to the tragic yet lovely rhythm of people who employ harmonious rhythms which are not identical. Maurya, Nora, Cathleen, and Bartley all use the accent of the Aran Islanders. But Bartley is swaggering, Cathleen patient, Nora quick with youth, and Mauraya slow with age. The combination is one of the most beautiful in English.’
5. ‘The dialogue must stem from the character, not the author.’
Genius
‘The extraordinary mental power of a genius is not necessarily strong enough to create his success. First, one must have a start, an opportunity to deepen one’s knowledge in a chosen profession. A genius has the ability to work at something longer and with more patience than any other man.’
Something to practise while narrating your story
‘If you must read your work to someone, ask that person to tell you the moment he begins to feel tired or bored.’
‘A play should start with the first line uttered’. In films, it should start with the first frame and first sound.
‘…”exposition” should proceed constantly, without interruption, to the very end of the play.’ – cramming information into dialogues in patches here and there will not work. Audience should understand what you are exposing in the flow of the film/play.
Egri says that the ‘obligatory scene’ is not really a thing. It just means a scene that will prove your premise the best – and by its nature, it has to be there in all work of fiction.
February 11, 2023
If more writers read this, we would have more good books (not even sorry)
This was beautifully written with such good and understandable examples. The author explained the basic structure of a play really well leaving room for creative thinking. I found the book very insightful as a reader as well as an aspiring writer, advice given in this can be used in constructing a great play but also can be adapted to novels, novellas or honestly any form of writing.
This was beautifully written with such good and understandable examples. The author explained the basic structure of a play really well leaving room for creative thinking. I found the book very insightful as a reader as well as an aspiring writer, advice given in this can be used in constructing a great play but also can be adapted to novels, novellas or honestly any form of writing.
July 9, 2008
I want to retract what I wrote before. This book makes some important points when it comes to structuring/developing dramatic stories around dynamic characters. I found the style (overly wordy and written in a contrived informal tone, as if the author is ushering you to some holy grail) confused more than it clarified and made the ideas hard to stomach. So I’d say, read the first few paragraphs of each chapter to understand the concept Egri’s trying to illustrate, skim his explanations of plays that exemplify those concepts, then read the chapter’s conclusion to pull together any loose ends. The ideas are worth understanding, but not always presented in a fluid manner.
September 19, 2022
原理的部分有趣，但談到電視的部分……這是電視還只能直播的時代出的書呢！
April 30, 2013
One of the 2 or 3 best books i've ever read on writing, and i've read quite a few. Story by Robert McKee is very solid and a must read for film makers, but this book combined with Dara Marks inside story should be read, studied and read again. Everything you want to know about plot and character come together in this brilliant How-to masterpiece.
October 17, 2022
Without this book, my novel wouldn't be what it is
December 17, 2022
Ottimo manuale. Spiegato molto bene e soprattutto molto interessante.
September 10, 2026
excelenta!
June 20, 2021
Despite the author’s best intentions, this ultimately made for a tiresome read.
Egri often fails to elaborate on his constant exhortations, and outright discounts plays without explaining why. I found myself frustrated by his pedantic style of prose, and his decision to straw-man most of his opponents’ arguments didn’t exactly do much in favour of his cause. This is a shame, as his theory does have some merit, and I often agreed with what he was saying. In the hands of another writer, this could have easily made for a stimulating read.
That said, I can’t exactly say that I wasted my time here. If you’re looking for some Henrik Ibsen propaganda, look no further.
A brief aside, but I get the impression that Egri is a bit of a sexist: so far as I can recollect he only references a female writer once, and even then it is begrudgingly. His aesthetic theories are also rather lacklustre: he speaks of geniuses of great men specifically, and art as the perfection of the universe, and acts as if both of these revelations are both comprehensive in their own right and even remotely insightful. Overall, I get the impression that Egri wrote this book to lord it over his students, and his readers in turn. How people are willing to look past its latent sexism and the incessant arrogance of its author is beyond me. It is arduous.
Egri often fails to elaborate on his constant exhortations, and outright discounts plays without explaining why. I found myself frustrated by his pedantic style of prose, and his decision to straw-man most of his opponents’ arguments didn’t exactly do much in favour of his cause. This is a shame, as his theory does have some merit, and I often agreed with what he was saying. In the hands of another writer, this could have easily made for a stimulating read.
That said, I can’t exactly say that I wasted my time here. If you’re looking for some Henrik Ibsen propaganda, look no further.
A brief aside, but I get the impression that Egri is a bit of a sexist: so far as I can recollect he only references a female writer once, and even then it is begrudgingly. His aesthetic theories are also rather lacklustre: he speaks of geniuses of great men specifically, and art as the perfection of the universe, and acts as if both of these revelations are both comprehensive in their own right and even remotely insightful. Overall, I get the impression that Egri wrote this book to lord it over his students, and his readers in turn. How people are willing to look past its latent sexism and the incessant arrogance of its author is beyond me. It is arduous.
March 29, 2011
This is a masterpiece of instruction.
Egri's approach is that of a naturalist and Socratic philosopher.
He bases his theory on observed phenomenon and allows illustration from example to prove his hypothesis. He then provides an approach using dialectics to encourage and challenge potential emotional resistance to the ideas.
The strongest and most exciting notion within this work is Egri's insistence on premise as the essential component for playwriting. My fledgling experience as a serious writer seems to prove this insistence. When I know what I am attempting to argue at a philosophical level I am more able to focus the action of the story and the characters towards that reality.
Egri provides compelling reasons for premise and then deepens this knowledge with a concern for character where the realization of character is the plot's essence. I enjoy the fact that Egri holds to a philology that does not seek after mysticism within creativity's fancy but rather demands discipline with known dramatic elements observed over time.
He channels A Darwinian sensibility of what is real towards the hope for an illumination of what is true.
If you love stories I recommend reading this wonderful guide book.
Egri's approach is that of a naturalist and Socratic philosopher.
He bases his theory on observed phenomenon and allows illustration from example to prove his hypothesis. He then provides an approach using dialectics to encourage and challenge potential emotional resistance to the ideas.
The strongest and most exciting notion within this work is Egri's insistence on premise as the essential component for playwriting. My fledgling experience as a serious writer seems to prove this insistence. When I know what I am attempting to argue at a philosophical level I am more able to focus the action of the story and the characters towards that reality.
Egri provides compelling reasons for premise and then deepens this knowledge with a concern for character where the realization of character is the plot's essence. I enjoy the fact that Egri holds to a philology that does not seek after mysticism within creativity's fancy but rather demands discipline with known dramatic elements observed over time.
He channels A Darwinian sensibility of what is real towards the hope for an illumination of what is true.
If you love stories I recommend reading this wonderful guide book.
March 9, 2018
For character development, character formation and recognition of style faults tremendously useful helper
Please note that I put the original German text at the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.
With his works "Dramatic Writing" and "Literary Writing," Egri has created two profound and detail-by-detail guides that illustrate the creative process, clearly describing how to fail or shine. In the present "Dramatic Writing," the focus is primarily on the dramaturgy of the theater, which is in no way limited to use for Victorian stage monologues.
On the contrary, new perspectives open up for related scripts and fiction. For literature, the advice can be useful in the creation of dialogue and character, choice of narrative speed, structure, effects of subsequent changes, premise and the design of conflicts. In contrast to pure scribal advisors, Egri's work has the advantage of being able to do without explanations on specific literary problems and techniques and to be able to focus entirely on language and characters.
As a result, the personal development is carried out in a detailed manner and by numerous, well-comprehensible examples that are rarely found in the broader advisory literature. The performers somewhat subordinate and incidental also premise and conflicts are treated. Since these are but incessantly associated with the people of work and their character and motives must adapt to ensure tension, credibility and reading fluency, they play according to Egri rather the second fiddle.
Everything stands and falls with personalities that are realistically presented to perfection. Even lacking such a clever plot or rousing conflicts about the deficits in the empty pods that lead to these events cannot be deceptive.
Egri's advice is not so much an infallible one but rather practical examples of how to do it right, but not necessarily. Too rigorous compliance, on the contrary, threatens a tendency towards stereotypical figures and predictable storylines. Unless you are close to the championship or at least already well versed. Moreover, who can say that already?
Many subsequently easier to change aspects than the Dramatis Personae such as environments, details of the plot and sequence of scenes are mentioned only marginally or not at all. Necessarily, the essence and elixir of life of every halfway believable entertaining medium are real and comprehensible alternate personalities. These act three-dimensionally and accurately according to their mentality.
If cracks and gaps arise that lead to logic errors and implausible, superficial dialogues and abstruse actions that do not suit the characterization, there is a threat of shrinking from public interest to the resignation termination of the reading process. One of the few shortcomings of the work is the tendency of the author to articulate long and extravagant comparisons, metaphors and references to natural sciences. And also in the practical instructions to repeat long and wide. The second is understandable, as necessary for understanding.
The long and especially after decades no longer current and correct digressions in non-thematic areas would not have been necessary. The excess harmed the original purpose of the pictorial representation for better illustration. An intellectual self-adulation that is slightly detrimental to the work and unnecessarily lengthens it. I recommend the principle of reading over.
Even with some of the more extended excerpts from, in German-speaking countries mostly unknown, works would have been less. The fact that these are no longer up-to-date cannot be held up to the author, in contrast to other points of criticism.
The disadvantage lies in the more inadequate and more cumbersome applicability in practice since this writing style is antiquated and many examples can be more challenging to implement in contemporary literature. In summary, Egri's advice has influenced generations of authors and writers. Especially in the further development of his concepts towards a better use for contemporary literature will be a challenge for future faculties of creative writing.
Für Charakterentwicklung, Figurenbildung und Erkennung von Stilfehlern ungemein nützlicher Helfer
Egri hat mit seinen Werken „Dramatisches Schreiben“ und „Literarisches Schreiben“ zwei profunde und Detail für Detail den Schaffungsprozess veranschaulichende Ratgeber geschaffen, die auf verständliche Weise beschreiben, wie man scheitert oder brilliert. Im vorliegenden „Dramatischen Schreiben“ liegt der Fokus primär auf der Dramaturgie des Theaters, was sich aber in keiner Weise auf die Nutzung für viktorianische Bühnenmonologe beschränkt.
Im Gegenteil eröffnen sich für artverwandte Drehbücher und auch Belletristik neue Perspektiven. Bei Literatur lassen sich die Ratschläge besonders bei der Dialog- und Charaktererstellung, Wahl der Erzählgeschwindigkeit, Aufbau, Auswirkungen von nachträglichen Änderungen, Prämisse und Konzipierung von Konflikten hilfreich einsetzen.
Denn im Gegensatz zu reinen Schreibratgebern birgt Egris Werk den Vorteil in sich, ohne Erklärungen zu spezifisch literarischen Problemstellungen und Techniken auskommen zu können und sich gänzlich auf Sprache und Charaktere fokussieren zu können. Dadurch wird die Personenentwicklung in einer Detailliertheit und anhand zahlreicher, gut nachvollziehbarer Beispiele vollzogen, die man in breiter gestreuter Ratgeberliteratur selten findet.
Den Darstellern eher nachrangig und nebensächlich werden auch Prämisse und Konflikte behandelt. Da diese aber unaufkündbar mit den Menschen eines Werks verbunden sind und sich deren Charakter und Motiven anpassen müssen, um Spannung, Glaubwürdigkeit und Lesefluss zu gewährleisten, spielen sie laut Egri eher die zweite Geige. Es steht und fällt alles mit bis zur Perfektion realistisch dargestellten Persönlichkeiten. Bei deren Fehlen kann auch kein noch so gewitzter Plot oder mitreißende Konflikte über die Defizite in den leeren Hülsen, die durch diese Ereignisse führen, hinweg täuschen.
Die Ratschläge Egris sind weniger unumstößliche Regeln, sondern eher praktische Beispiele, wie man es richtig machen kann, aber nicht muss. Bei allzu rigider Befolgung droht im Gegenteil eher eine Tendenz zu klischeehaften Figuren und vorhersehbaren Handlungssträngen. Sofern man nicht der Meisterschaft nahe oder zumindest schon sehr versiert ist. Und wer kann das schon von sich behaupten.
Viele nachträglich leichter als die Dramatis Personae zu ändernde Aspekte wie Umgebungen, Plotfeinheiten und Szenenabfolgen werden nur am Rand oder gar nicht erwähnt. Im Kern sind die Essenz und das Lebenselixier eines jeden halbwegs glaubwürdig unterhaltenden Mediums real und nachvollziehbar agierende Persönlichkeiten. Diese handeln dreidimensional und akkurat ihrer Mentalität entsprechend. Entstehen Risse und Lücken, die sich zu Logikfehlern und unglaubwürdigen, oberflächlichen Dialogen und abstrusen, nicht zu der Charakterisierung passenden Handlungen steigern, droht das Schwinden von Publikumsinteresse bis hin zum resignativen Abbruch des Lesevorgangs.
Zu den wenigen Mankos des Werks gehört die Tendenz des Autors, sich lang und ausschweifend mittels Vergleichen, Metaphern und Bezügen zu Naturwissenschaften zu artikulieren. Und sich auch in den praktischen Hinweisen lang und breit zu wiederholen. Zweiteres ist nachvollziehbar, da für das Verständnis notwendig. Die langen und vor allem nach Jahrzehnten nicht mehr aktuellen und richtigen Exkurse in themenfremde Bereiche wären jedoch nicht notwendig gewesen. Dem ursprünglichen Zweck der bildlichen Darstellung zur besseren Veranschaulichung wurde durch das Übermaß Schaden angetan. Eine intellektuelle Selbstbeweihräucherung, die dem Werk eher abträglich ist und es unnötig in die Länge zieht. Es empfiehlt sich das Prinzip des Überlesens.
Auch bei manchen der längeren Ausschnitte aus, im deutschen Sprachraum weitgehend unbekannten, Werken wäre weniger mehr gewesen. Das diese nicht mehr zeitgemäß sind, kann man dem Autor im Gegensatz zu anderen Kritikpunkten nicht vorhalten. Der Nachteil liegt in der schlechteren und umständlicheren Anwendbarkeit in der Praxis, da dieser Schreibstil antiquiert ist und sich viele Beispiele dadurch schwerer auf Gegenwartsliteratur umsetzen lassen.
Resümierend betrachtet haben die Ratschläge Egris Generationen von Autoren und Schriftstellern beeinflusst. Gerade in der Weiterentwicklung seiner Konzepte hin zur besseren Nutzbarmachung für die Gegenwartsliteratur wird eine Herausforderung für zukünftige Lehrkörper des kreativen Schreibens liegen.
Please note that I put the original German text at the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.
With his works "Dramatic Writing" and "Literary Writing," Egri has created two profound and detail-by-detail guides that illustrate the creative process, clearly describing how to fail or shine. In the present "Dramatic Writing," the focus is primarily on the dramaturgy of the theater, which is in no way limited to use for Victorian stage monologues.
On the contrary, new perspectives open up for related scripts and fiction. For literature, the advice can be useful in the creation of dialogue and character, choice of narrative speed, structure, effects of subsequent changes, premise and the design of conflicts. In contrast to pure scribal advisors, Egri's work has the advantage of being able to do without explanations on specific literary problems and techniques and to be able to focus entirely on language and characters.
As a result, the personal development is carried out in a detailed manner and by numerous, well-comprehensible examples that are rarely found in the broader advisory literature. The performers somewhat subordinate and incidental also premise and conflicts are treated. Since these are but incessantly associated with the people of work and their character and motives must adapt to ensure tension, credibility and reading fluency, they play according to Egri rather the second fiddle.
Everything stands and falls with personalities that are realistically presented to perfection. Even lacking such a clever plot or rousing conflicts about the deficits in the empty pods that lead to these events cannot be deceptive.
Egri's advice is not so much an infallible one but rather practical examples of how to do it right, but not necessarily. Too rigorous compliance, on the contrary, threatens a tendency towards stereotypical figures and predictable storylines. Unless you are close to the championship or at least already well versed. Moreover, who can say that already?
Many subsequently easier to change aspects than the Dramatis Personae such as environments, details of the plot and sequence of scenes are mentioned only marginally or not at all. Necessarily, the essence and elixir of life of every halfway believable entertaining medium are real and comprehensible alternate personalities. These act three-dimensionally and accurately according to their mentality.
If cracks and gaps arise that lead to logic errors and implausible, superficial dialogues and abstruse actions that do not suit the characterization, there is a threat of shrinking from public interest to the resignation termination of the reading process. One of the few shortcomings of the work is the tendency of the author to articulate long and extravagant comparisons, metaphors and references to natural sciences. And also in the practical instructions to repeat long and wide. The second is understandable, as necessary for understanding.
The long and especially after decades no longer current and correct digressions in non-thematic areas would not have been necessary. The excess harmed the original purpose of the pictorial representation for better illustration. An intellectual self-adulation that is slightly detrimental to the work and unnecessarily lengthens it. I recommend the principle of reading over.
Even with some of the more extended excerpts from, in German-speaking countries mostly unknown, works would have been less. The fact that these are no longer up-to-date cannot be held up to the author, in contrast to other points of criticism.
The disadvantage lies in the more inadequate and more cumbersome applicability in practice since this writing style is antiquated and many examples can be more challenging to implement in contemporary literature. In summary, Egri's advice has influenced generations of authors and writers. Especially in the further development of his concepts towards a better use for contemporary literature will be a challenge for future faculties of creative writing.
Für Charakterentwicklung, Figurenbildung und Erkennung von Stilfehlern ungemein nützlicher Helfer
Egri hat mit seinen Werken „Dramatisches Schreiben“ und „Literarisches Schreiben“ zwei profunde und Detail für Detail den Schaffungsprozess veranschaulichende Ratgeber geschaffen, die auf verständliche Weise beschreiben, wie man scheitert oder brilliert. Im vorliegenden „Dramatischen Schreiben“ liegt der Fokus primär auf der Dramaturgie des Theaters, was sich aber in keiner Weise auf die Nutzung für viktorianische Bühnenmonologe beschränkt.
Im Gegenteil eröffnen sich für artverwandte Drehbücher und auch Belletristik neue Perspektiven. Bei Literatur lassen sich die Ratschläge besonders bei der Dialog- und Charaktererstellung, Wahl der Erzählgeschwindigkeit, Aufbau, Auswirkungen von nachträglichen Änderungen, Prämisse und Konzipierung von Konflikten hilfreich einsetzen.
Denn im Gegensatz zu reinen Schreibratgebern birgt Egris Werk den Vorteil in sich, ohne Erklärungen zu spezifisch literarischen Problemstellungen und Techniken auskommen zu können und sich gänzlich auf Sprache und Charaktere fokussieren zu können. Dadurch wird die Personenentwicklung in einer Detailliertheit und anhand zahlreicher, gut nachvollziehbarer Beispiele vollzogen, die man in breiter gestreuter Ratgeberliteratur selten findet.
Den Darstellern eher nachrangig und nebensächlich werden auch Prämisse und Konflikte behandelt. Da diese aber unaufkündbar mit den Menschen eines Werks verbunden sind und sich deren Charakter und Motiven anpassen müssen, um Spannung, Glaubwürdigkeit und Lesefluss zu gewährleisten, spielen sie laut Egri eher die zweite Geige. Es steht und fällt alles mit bis zur Perfektion realistisch dargestellten Persönlichkeiten. Bei deren Fehlen kann auch kein noch so gewitzter Plot oder mitreißende Konflikte über die Defizite in den leeren Hülsen, die durch diese Ereignisse führen, hinweg täuschen.
Die Ratschläge Egris sind weniger unumstößliche Regeln, sondern eher praktische Beispiele, wie man es richtig machen kann, aber nicht muss. Bei allzu rigider Befolgung droht im Gegenteil eher eine Tendenz zu klischeehaften Figuren und vorhersehbaren Handlungssträngen. Sofern man nicht der Meisterschaft nahe oder zumindest schon sehr versiert ist. Und wer kann das schon von sich behaupten.
Viele nachträglich leichter als die Dramatis Personae zu ändernde Aspekte wie Umgebungen, Plotfeinheiten und Szenenabfolgen werden nur am Rand oder gar nicht erwähnt. Im Kern sind die Essenz und das Lebenselixier eines jeden halbwegs glaubwürdig unterhaltenden Mediums real und nachvollziehbar agierende Persönlichkeiten. Diese handeln dreidimensional und akkurat ihrer Mentalität entsprechend. Entstehen Risse und Lücken, die sich zu Logikfehlern und unglaubwürdigen, oberflächlichen Dialogen und abstrusen, nicht zu der Charakterisierung passenden Handlungen steigern, droht das Schwinden von Publikumsinteresse bis hin zum resignativen Abbruch des Lesevorgangs.
Zu den wenigen Mankos des Werks gehört die Tendenz des Autors, sich lang und ausschweifend mittels Vergleichen, Metaphern und Bezügen zu Naturwissenschaften zu artikulieren. Und sich auch in den praktischen Hinweisen lang und breit zu wiederholen. Zweiteres ist nachvollziehbar, da für das Verständnis notwendig. Die langen und vor allem nach Jahrzehnten nicht mehr aktuellen und richtigen Exkurse in themenfremde Bereiche wären jedoch nicht notwendig gewesen. Dem ursprünglichen Zweck der bildlichen Darstellung zur besseren Veranschaulichung wurde durch das Übermaß Schaden angetan. Eine intellektuelle Selbstbeweihräucherung, die dem Werk eher abträglich ist und es unnötig in die Länge zieht. Es empfiehlt sich das Prinzip des Überlesens.
Auch bei manchen der längeren Ausschnitte aus, im deutschen Sprachraum weitgehend unbekannten, Werken wäre weniger mehr gewesen. Das diese nicht mehr zeitgemäß sind, kann man dem Autor im Gegensatz zu anderen Kritikpunkten nicht vorhalten. Der Nachteil liegt in der schlechteren und umständlicheren Anwendbarkeit in der Praxis, da dieser Schreibstil antiquiert ist und sich viele Beispiele dadurch schwerer auf Gegenwartsliteratur umsetzen lassen.
Resümierend betrachtet haben die Ratschläge Egris Generationen von Autoren und Schriftstellern beeinflusst. Gerade in der Weiterentwicklung seiner Konzepte hin zur besseren Nutzbarmachung für die Gegenwartsliteratur wird eine Herausforderung für zukünftige Lehrkörper des kreativen Schreibens liegen.
February 14, 2023
An interesting read for authors. While admittedly this is targeted at playwriters, Egri's advice is golden for novel authors and storytellers as a whole. I found myself agreeing with the core concepts of the book - namely, the importance of premise, character and conflict, and how those aspects are closely coupled.
Admittedly, Egri can sound a bit opinionated at times, which might brush some readers off. But I appreciated how the book departs from most other manuals of the same sort. My greatest fear was to find it trite, but it proved to be unfounded.
Admittedly, Egri can sound a bit opinionated at times, which might brush some readers off. But I appreciated how the book departs from most other manuals of the same sort. My greatest fear was to find it trite, but it proved to be unfounded.
May 5, 2019
Замечательная книга о литературном искусстве: даётся пошаговая инструкция по созданию художественного произведения.
Параллельно анализируется творчество Шекспира, Чехова, американских и античных писателей.
Автор демонстрирует глубокое понимание психологии и жизни, давая разумные советы начинающим сценаристам и писателям.
Это любимая книга Вуди Аллена, рекомендованная одним из гостей шоу/книги Тима Ферриса "Инструменты гигантов".
Получил огромное удовольствие от прочтения, осознал почему нравятся романы Толстого и Достоевского.
PS На русском языке книге издана под названием "Искусство драматургии".
Параллельно анализируется творчество Шекспира, Чехова, американских и античных писателей.
Автор демонстрирует глубокое понимание психологии и жизни, давая разумные советы начинающим сценаристам и писателям.
Это любимая книга Вуди Аллена, рекомендованная одним из гостей шоу/книги Тима Ферриса "Инструменты гигантов".
Получил огромное удовольствие от прочтения, осознал почему нравятся романы Толстого и Достоевского.
PS На русском языке книге издана под названием "Искусство драматургии".
December 4, 2024
Lagos Egri really tackled everything aspect here, this is like a Bible for playwriting. I don't see why anyone in the writing industry should not read it.
Read
June 17, 2012إنّ الحياة هي التغير ، و أقل اضطراب في أي دقيقة من دقائقها يغيّرها جميعاً
و البيئة إذا تغيّرت تغيّر الإنسانُ معها . والشاب الحدثُ إذا لقيَ سيدة صغيرة
في الظروف السليمة المناسبة فإنه ربما انجذب إليها بفعل ما يتفقان فيه
من مشارب مثل حبهما للأدب أو الفنون أو الألعاب الرياضية . و هذه المشاركة
العامة في أمر من الأمور قد تكبر و تشتد وتتعمق جذورها حتى تصبحَ غراماً
و تعاطفاً تشترك فيه وجداناتهما . و إذا لم يُعكّر صَفْوَ انسجامها هذا شيء
فلا شك أنه يصبح افتتاناً و صبابة . و مع هذا فالافتتان ليس هو الحب ، لكنه
يقترب من الحب في تحركه إلى نطاق الإخلاص و الولاء ، ثم إلى نطاق الولع
و فرط التخيل و البهجة باللقاء ، أو نطاق العبادة التي هي الحب بالفعل .
و الحب هو آخر مرحلة في ذلك جميعاً ، و من الممكن اختبار هذا الحب بالاقدام
على التضحية ، إذ الحب الحقيقي هو القدرة على تحمل أي مشقة في سبيل
المحبوب .
و العاطفة التي تربط قلبين قد تنهج هذا النهج إذا سار كل شيء في طريقه
الصحيح . و إذا لم يعترض قصة حبهما شيء و هو في طور تفتحه الأول
فقد يتزوجان و يعيشان عيشة سعيدة بعد ذلك إلى آخر لحظة من حياتهما .
و لكن لنفرض أن هذين الحبيبين الصغيرين نفسيهما قد بلغا مرتبة الوداد
و الترابط ، ثم جاء همّاز نمّام حاقد فأخبر الشاب الصغير بأن صاحبته كانت
لها قصة حب قبل أن يعرفها ، فإذا كان الشاب قليل التجربة و لا خبرة له
بهذه المواقف، فسوف يتأثر بما وسوس النمام إليه ثم ينفض يديه من تلك
السيدة الصغيرة ، و ذلك بأن يتحول وداده إلى برود ، ثم يتحول بروده
فيكون حقداً أو ضغينة ، و الحقد و الضغينة يصبحان تنافراً و ازوراراً .
فإذا كانت الفتاة جريئة القلب لا تبالي أن تناوئ و تتحدى فقد يتحول
التنافر فيكون مرارة ، ثم عداوة و خصومة ولدداً .
و على العكس من هذا إذا كانت والدة الشاب الحدث نفسه قد مرت بها
قبل زواجها من أبيه تجربةٌ كالتجربة التي مرّت بها الفتاة ، ثم أصبحت
زوجة كأحسن ما يكون الأزواج و أماً عظيمة الأمومة تبعاً لذلك ، فحينئذٍ
قد يتطور وداد الشاب فيكون حباً بصورة أسرع كثيراً مما لو كان
الأمر غير ذلك .
وقصة هذا الحب الساذج عرضة لأي عدد من التغيرات و التحولات ؛
فالمال الجم الزائد عن الحاجة ، كالمال القليل الذي لا يفي بتكاليف الحياة
يؤثر في مجرى هذا الحب و يُغيّر تياره ، و الصحة و المرض قد يقربان
نهاية الغرام وثمرة اللوعة أو يبطئانها . وحالة إحدى الأسرتين المالية
و الاجتماعية قد تؤثر في علاقة الحبيبين الغرامية ، أما إلى أحسن و أما
إلى أسوأ .. و الوراثة هي الأخرى .. إنها قد تقلب عربة التفاح رأساً على
عقب .
إن كل كائن بشري هو على الدوام في حالة تقلّب مستمر و تغيّر مستديم
بل ليس في الطبيعة كلها ما هو ساكن لا يجيش بالحركة ، ولا سيما
الإنسان .
و الشخصية كما ذكرنا آنفاً هي الثمرة الإجمالية _ أو المبلغ الإجمالي كما
يقول التجار _ لكيان الإنسان الجسماني و المؤثرات التي تفرضها عليه
بيئته في تلك اللحظة الخاصة .
و البيئة إذا تغيّرت تغيّر الإنسانُ معها . والشاب الحدثُ إذا لقيَ سيدة صغيرة
في الظروف السليمة المناسبة فإنه ربما انجذب إليها بفعل ما يتفقان فيه
من مشارب مثل حبهما للأدب أو الفنون أو الألعاب الرياضية . و هذه المشاركة
العامة في أمر من الأمور قد تكبر و تشتد وتتعمق جذورها حتى تصبحَ غراماً
و تعاطفاً تشترك فيه وجداناتهما . و إذا لم يُعكّر صَفْوَ انسجامها هذا شيء
فلا شك أنه يصبح افتتاناً و صبابة . و مع هذا فالافتتان ليس هو الحب ، لكنه
يقترب من الحب في تحركه إلى نطاق الإخلاص و الولاء ، ثم إلى نطاق الولع
و فرط التخيل و البهجة باللقاء ، أو نطاق العبادة التي هي الحب بالفعل .
و الحب هو آخر مرحلة في ذلك جميعاً ، و من الممكن اختبار هذا الحب بالاقدام
على التضحية ، إذ الحب الحقيقي هو القدرة على تحمل أي مشقة في سبيل
المحبوب .
و العاطفة التي تربط قلبين قد تنهج هذا النهج إذا سار كل شيء في طريقه
الصحيح . و إذا لم يعترض قصة حبهما شيء و هو في طور تفتحه الأول
فقد يتزوجان و يعيشان عيشة سعيدة بعد ذلك إلى آخر لحظة من حياتهما .
و لكن لنفرض أن هذين الحبيبين الصغيرين نفسيهما قد بلغا مرتبة الوداد
و الترابط ، ثم جاء همّاز نمّام حاقد فأخبر الشاب الصغير بأن صاحبته كانت
لها قصة حب قبل أن يعرفها ، فإذا كان الشاب قليل التجربة و لا خبرة له
بهذه المواقف، فسوف يتأثر بما وسوس النمام إليه ثم ينفض يديه من تلك
السيدة الصغيرة ، و ذلك بأن يتحول وداده إلى برود ، ثم يتحول بروده
فيكون حقداً أو ضغينة ، و الحقد و الضغينة يصبحان تنافراً و ازوراراً .
فإذا كانت الفتاة جريئة القلب لا تبالي أن تناوئ و تتحدى فقد يتحول
التنافر فيكون مرارة ، ثم عداوة و خصومة ولدداً .
و على العكس من هذا إذا كانت والدة الشاب الحدث نفسه قد مرت بها
قبل زواجها من أبيه تجربةٌ كالتجربة التي مرّت بها الفتاة ، ثم أصبحت
زوجة كأحسن ما يكون الأزواج و أماً عظيمة الأمومة تبعاً لذلك ، فحينئذٍ
قد يتطور وداد الشاب فيكون حباً بصورة أسرع كثيراً مما لو كان
الأمر غير ذلك .
وقصة هذا الحب الساذج عرضة لأي عدد من التغيرات و التحولات ؛
فالمال الجم الزائد عن الحاجة ، كالمال القليل الذي لا يفي بتكاليف الحياة
يؤثر في مجرى هذا الحب و يُغيّر تياره ، و الصحة و المرض قد يقربان
نهاية الغرام وثمرة اللوعة أو يبطئانها . وحالة إحدى الأسرتين المالية
و الاجتماعية قد تؤثر في علاقة الحبيبين الغرامية ، أما إلى أحسن و أما
إلى أسوأ .. و الوراثة هي الأخرى .. إنها قد تقلب عربة التفاح رأساً على
عقب .
إن كل كائن بشري هو على الدوام في حالة تقلّب مستمر و تغيّر مستديم
بل ليس في الطبيعة كلها ما هو ساكن لا يجيش بالحركة ، ولا سيما
الإنسان .
و الشخصية كما ذكرنا آنفاً هي الثمرة الإجمالية _ أو المبلغ الإجمالي كما
يقول التجار _ لكيان الإنسان الجسماني و المؤثرات التي تفرضها عليه
بيئته في تلك اللحظة الخاصة .
December 23, 2021
Una lectura más que pertinente para los aspirantes a escritores (e incluso para los experimentados), sin importar si desean dedicarse al teatro, la literatura, el cine, las series, los cómics o a otros tipos de narrativa. Si bien abundan libros sobre escritura narrativa más complejos y en los cuales se profundiza en mayor o menor medida, este libro es una excelente guía, llena de ejemplos, para comenzar a entender cómo darle forma a las historias que escribimos.
Aquí podemos encontrar aspectos, con sus respectivos ejemplos, de una buena historia (o mejor dicho, de una historia que no sea fácilmente olvidable) como lo son el planteamiento de una buena premisa, la construcción y evolución de personajes y la formulación de un conflicto que rete a estos personajes y haga avanzar la trama; sin dejar de lado la exposición, los diálogos, la experimentación, la gestación de ideas, entre otros temas.
Si querés dedicarte a ser narrador, este libro debería entrar en tu lista de próxima lecturas. Si ya lo leíste, nunca está demás repasarlo.
Aquí podemos encontrar aspectos, con sus respectivos ejemplos, de una buena historia (o mejor dicho, de una historia que no sea fácilmente olvidable) como lo son el planteamiento de una buena premisa, la construcción y evolución de personajes y la formulación de un conflicto que rete a estos personajes y haga avanzar la trama; sin dejar de lado la exposición, los diálogos, la experimentación, la gestación de ideas, entre otros temas.
Si querés dedicarte a ser narrador, este libro debería entrar en tu lista de próxima lecturas. Si ya lo leíste, nunca está demás repasarlo.
March 22, 2010
For some reason, I thought this would help with writing poetry. (Then again, I look at my cat and hope that will help with writing poetry.)
However, for a gutsy stance on how plays work, this is the place. It was (honestly) news to me that a play needs a "premise" and that you could boil Ibsen's Ghosts down to "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children."
Do poems need premises, too? Perhaps much less dramatic premises? Something like, "It is fun to say the letter 's' a lot."
Books with "rules" for art are always exciting -- because you want to prove them wrong but are thrilled to think them possibly true.
However, for a gutsy stance on how plays work, this is the place. It was (honestly) news to me that a play needs a "premise" and that you could boil Ibsen's Ghosts down to "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children."
Do poems need premises, too? Perhaps much less dramatic premises? Something like, "It is fun to say the letter 's' a lot."
Books with "rules" for art are always exciting -- because you want to prove them wrong but are thrilled to think them possibly true.
February 25, 2009
Tremendous resource for character development and orchestration, scene and conflict.
June 3, 2010
Lots of good information for writers here, some of it obviously geared to beginners but very helpful to experienced writers, as well.
September 22, 2013
I just reread this book after many years. Its perhaps the best book on dramatic writing I have ever read. It puts all the structural approaches like Sid Field, McKee et al to shame frankly.
April 10, 2024
Me parece un buen libro de inicio para aquellos que buscamos el camino de la creación literaria, tiene consejos útiles y te entender mejor unos conceptos clave, se lo recomiendo mucho.
December 6, 2025
Every few years a new book on writing appears, promising to unlock the secret machinery of story. Most evaporate as quickly as they arrive. Lajos Egri’s “The Art of Dramatic Writing”, first published in 1946, has done something much harder: it has gone on arguing with generations of writers long after its own theatrical examples slipped out of fashion. You do not read it as a neutral manual. You contend with it. That is, in many ways, its greatest strength.
Egri begins with an assertion that sounds almost embarrassingly simple: every serious work of drama must have a premise. Not a topic, not a mood, but a compressed, causal statement about human behavior. A genuine premise, in his sense, is something like: jealousy destroys the jealous; greed invites its own ruin; selfless love transforms the lover. You can disagree with his examples, or with the faintly moralistic phrasing, but you cannot mistake his intent. Drama, for Egri, is a laboratory of human motives. A play is an argument; the premise is the thesis; the scenes are its proof.
This insistence – that a play must know what it is trying to prove before the first line is written – is where Egri’s voice feels closest to a New York Times critic of the old school. He is not diffident. He has no interest in relativism. On the page he comes across as equal parts dramatist and editorialist, announcing that the confusion of a play without a premise is no better than a man jogging aimlessly down a street, insisting he has no idea where he is going. It is a blunt metaphor, but useful: many contemporary novels and films might profit from that image taped above the desk.
From that starting point he moves, with a kind of bulldozing logic, to his great subject: character. It is here that “The Art of Dramatic Writing” truly earns its long reputation. Where some modern craft books treat character as a list of quirks and preferences, Egri drills down to something more systematic. He proposes that any living character on stage (or page) can be analyzed in three dimensions: physiology, sociology, psychology. What does this person’s body, health, gender, age, and heredity suggest? In what class, family, neighborhood, and profession are they embedded? What convictions, neuroses, desires, and fears have grown out of that soil?
Of course, no actor or reader will ever see the entire dossier. Egri’s point is that the writer must. A character’s decision at the climax of a play is not an isolated spark; it is the last link in a chain. The man who commits murder in Act III has been prepared, slowly and perhaps invisibly, by a lifetime of physical limitations, economic humiliations, social pressures, and emotional frustrations. If you cannot insightfully trace those conditions, Egri implies, you have no business asking an audience to believe the shot fired in the final scene.
This is where the book’s voice becomes most distinctive. Egri is a dramatist, but he writes like an impatient social scientist. He is allergic to mystery for its own sake. Where a romantic critic might shrug and say that human beings are inexplicable, Egri answers that what we call mystery is often only incomplete information. Give him enough details about a character’s body, upbringing, environment, and belief system, and he will calmly predict what most of us would do under pressure. That confidence – at times exhilarating, at times overbearing – runs through every chapter.
Once premise and character are nailed down, Egri turns to conflict. Here he is not offering the familiar advice that “something should happen in every scene.” He is more exacting. Conflict, as he conceives it, must be rising, continuous, and rooted in a unity of opposites. Two characters are dramatically bound when neither can simply walk away; they want mutually exclusive things, but are locked into relationship by family, economics, love, duty, or some other inescapable tie. Nora and Helmer in “A Doll’s House”, Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders in “Ghosts”, the lovers in “Romeo and Juliet” – these pairings illustrate his point. No one in these plays can shrug, change jobs, and leave town without detonating the very premise the story is designed to prove.
He is particularly sharp on the varieties of failed conflict. Static conflict is his term for what happens when characters quarrel without consequence. Voices rise, tempers flare, but nothing in the relationship has materially shifted by the end of the scene; no new commitment has been made, no bridge burned, no fresh pressure applied. Jumping conflict is subtler but, to him, equally fatal: the moment when a writer, bored with the slow accumulation of causes, manufactures a sudden reversal without adequate preparation. The man who has been cautious for two acts becomes reckless overnight; the loyal wife turns traitor on page 80 because the plot requires a twist. Egri has no patience for this kind of improvisation. A play that jumps instead of grows, he argues, teaches the audience to distrust every future turn.
The positive prescription – rising conflict built step by step – is not unique to Egri, but he explains it with an almost anatomical clarity. He sees drama as an ascending curve of crisis, climax, and resolution, repeated in smaller waves inside each act. The climax is not a loud scene arbitrarily placed near the end; it is the only possible outcome of all previous choices, the moment when the premise is finally and decisively proved. Read in this light, his analyses of “Ghosts” or “Mourning Becomes Electra” function like a seasoned critic’s column: he dissects how each revelation tightens the noose, how each compromise weakens the characters’ ability to escape, until there is nothing left but the stark fulfillment of the play’s central statement.
If this were all the book did – argue for a declarative premise, demand thoroughly motivated characters, insist on causally rigorous conflict – it would already justify its longevity. But Egri also spends a surprisingly large portion of his pages on what might be called applied dramaturgy: the problem of exposition, the so-called “obligatory scene,” entrances and exits, even the question of why some obviously bad plays enjoy indecently long runs on Broadway. These chapters feel less like a theorist at work and more like a veteran reviewer pouring out his marginal notes.
On exposition he is especially bracing. The temptation, in lesser hands, is to dispense with background information in clumsy lumps – servants explaining the plot to each other, couples helpfully recalling their shared history for the benefit of the balcony. Egri insists that exposition should be indistinguishable from conflict. We learn who characters are, and what has happened to them before the curtain rose, only as they push and resist, threaten and conceal. A secret is never recited; it is defended, weaponized, or dragged into the light. If there is a New York Times-like sensibility in the book, it is here: a belief that information is most illuminating when revealed under pressure.
Not everything in “The Art of Dramatic Writing” ages as well as its central ideas. The examples are overwhelmingly drawn from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European drama, with the occasional venture into Greek tragedy or Shakespeare. Readers raised on “The Sopranos” or “Moonlight” may find themselves craving a bridge between Egri’s world of corseted secrets and their own more hybrid storytelling forms. His language, too, carries the assumptions of its era. Women and men, races and classes, are sometimes sketched in broad strokes that today’s readers will (rightly) interrogate. There are moments when his confidence in diagnosing “types” of people crosses the line into an unexamined determinism.
Then there is his tone. Egri does not hedge, and he does not apologize. His rules are not gentle suggestions; they are pronounced with the authority of natural law. Art, he says in effect, is dialectical – a ceaseless clash of opposing forces – and any play that fails to embody this movement is “no play at all.” For some contemporary writers, schooled in a more pluralistic critique, this rigidity will rankle. Can there be no room for the fragmentary, the episodic, the deliberately unresolved? Must every story prove something?
Yet even here the book provokes the kind of productive disagreement that strong criticism should. You do not have to become a disciple to benefit from Egri’s severity. His demand that you articulate a premise forces a useful self-scrutiny: what do you really believe about jealousy, or power, or forgiveness? His insistence on tridimensional character building challenges glib gestures toward “complexity.” His contempt for arbitrary plot twists obliges you to see whether your own climaxes are earned, or simply willed into being.
One of the quiet virtues of “The Art of Dramatic Writing” is how easily its principles migrate beyond the stage. Egri himself, in later sections, nods toward television, but the larger implications are clear. A novelist wrestling with the sprawl of a multi-character narrative can ask Egri’s questions about unity of opposites: who, in this book, truly cannot walk away? A screenwriter struggling with a second-act stall might look at the conflict-curve and realize that scenes have been static, rearranging the furniture of the premise without increasing the stakes. Even a nonfiction writer, assembling a reported essay, could learn from his emphasis on cause and effect – the insistence that events be interpreted, not merely catalogued.
What gives the book a contemporary resonance, despite its period trappings, is that it treats drama as a moral and intellectual act. For Egri, structure is not an abstract puzzle; it is an ethical responsibility. To construct a play in which people suffer and die, without understanding why they act as they do, is a kind of artistic negligence. A writer owes the audience more than sensation; they owe them an honest exploration of motive. In an age of content churn, that seriousness feels almost radical.
None of this is to say that reading Egri is effortless. The prose is dense, the analyses extended, the theatrical canon he assumes sometimes remote. A reader expecting the breezy encouragement of many modern writing guides will be disappointed. This is closer to sitting through a semester-long seminar with a formidable professor who has very little time for your excuses. But with patience, the book offers something rare: not a set of tricks, but a coherent way of thinking about dramatic action.
If one were forced, with all the arbitrariness Egri himself would deplore, to translate that experience into a number, this book’s achievement might reasonably be placed at 88 out of 100. The remaining twelve points are the price of time – the dated examples, the unexamined assumptions, the occasional dogmatism. The much larger share reflects the enduring power of its core insights: that stories are not accidents; that characters are not mannequins but organisms; that conflict, to matter, must grow logically from who people are and what they believe.
Perhaps the best measure of “The Art of Dramatic Writing” is that, seventy-odd years on, it still teaches by opposition. One finishes it not merely with a list of dos and don’ts, but with a sharpened sense of one’s own premises. Do you accept Egri’s belief that every serious work must prove a thesis? Do you share his faith in the explainability of human behavior? Do you, like him, see drama as the relentless unfolding of consequences? Whether you answer yes, no, or something in between, you come away better equipped to ask the questions that matter. And that, whatever our disagreements, is what lasting criticism – and lasting craft guidance – is supposed to do.
Egri begins with an assertion that sounds almost embarrassingly simple: every serious work of drama must have a premise. Not a topic, not a mood, but a compressed, causal statement about human behavior. A genuine premise, in his sense, is something like: jealousy destroys the jealous; greed invites its own ruin; selfless love transforms the lover. You can disagree with his examples, or with the faintly moralistic phrasing, but you cannot mistake his intent. Drama, for Egri, is a laboratory of human motives. A play is an argument; the premise is the thesis; the scenes are its proof.
This insistence – that a play must know what it is trying to prove before the first line is written – is where Egri’s voice feels closest to a New York Times critic of the old school. He is not diffident. He has no interest in relativism. On the page he comes across as equal parts dramatist and editorialist, announcing that the confusion of a play without a premise is no better than a man jogging aimlessly down a street, insisting he has no idea where he is going. It is a blunt metaphor, but useful: many contemporary novels and films might profit from that image taped above the desk.
From that starting point he moves, with a kind of bulldozing logic, to his great subject: character. It is here that “The Art of Dramatic Writing” truly earns its long reputation. Where some modern craft books treat character as a list of quirks and preferences, Egri drills down to something more systematic. He proposes that any living character on stage (or page) can be analyzed in three dimensions: physiology, sociology, psychology. What does this person’s body, health, gender, age, and heredity suggest? In what class, family, neighborhood, and profession are they embedded? What convictions, neuroses, desires, and fears have grown out of that soil?
Of course, no actor or reader will ever see the entire dossier. Egri’s point is that the writer must. A character’s decision at the climax of a play is not an isolated spark; it is the last link in a chain. The man who commits murder in Act III has been prepared, slowly and perhaps invisibly, by a lifetime of physical limitations, economic humiliations, social pressures, and emotional frustrations. If you cannot insightfully trace those conditions, Egri implies, you have no business asking an audience to believe the shot fired in the final scene.
This is where the book’s voice becomes most distinctive. Egri is a dramatist, but he writes like an impatient social scientist. He is allergic to mystery for its own sake. Where a romantic critic might shrug and say that human beings are inexplicable, Egri answers that what we call mystery is often only incomplete information. Give him enough details about a character’s body, upbringing, environment, and belief system, and he will calmly predict what most of us would do under pressure. That confidence – at times exhilarating, at times overbearing – runs through every chapter.
Once premise and character are nailed down, Egri turns to conflict. Here he is not offering the familiar advice that “something should happen in every scene.” He is more exacting. Conflict, as he conceives it, must be rising, continuous, and rooted in a unity of opposites. Two characters are dramatically bound when neither can simply walk away; they want mutually exclusive things, but are locked into relationship by family, economics, love, duty, or some other inescapable tie. Nora and Helmer in “A Doll’s House”, Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders in “Ghosts”, the lovers in “Romeo and Juliet” – these pairings illustrate his point. No one in these plays can shrug, change jobs, and leave town without detonating the very premise the story is designed to prove.
He is particularly sharp on the varieties of failed conflict. Static conflict is his term for what happens when characters quarrel without consequence. Voices rise, tempers flare, but nothing in the relationship has materially shifted by the end of the scene; no new commitment has been made, no bridge burned, no fresh pressure applied. Jumping conflict is subtler but, to him, equally fatal: the moment when a writer, bored with the slow accumulation of causes, manufactures a sudden reversal without adequate preparation. The man who has been cautious for two acts becomes reckless overnight; the loyal wife turns traitor on page 80 because the plot requires a twist. Egri has no patience for this kind of improvisation. A play that jumps instead of grows, he argues, teaches the audience to distrust every future turn.
The positive prescription – rising conflict built step by step – is not unique to Egri, but he explains it with an almost anatomical clarity. He sees drama as an ascending curve of crisis, climax, and resolution, repeated in smaller waves inside each act. The climax is not a loud scene arbitrarily placed near the end; it is the only possible outcome of all previous choices, the moment when the premise is finally and decisively proved. Read in this light, his analyses of “Ghosts” or “Mourning Becomes Electra” function like a seasoned critic’s column: he dissects how each revelation tightens the noose, how each compromise weakens the characters’ ability to escape, until there is nothing left but the stark fulfillment of the play’s central statement.
If this were all the book did – argue for a declarative premise, demand thoroughly motivated characters, insist on causally rigorous conflict – it would already justify its longevity. But Egri also spends a surprisingly large portion of his pages on what might be called applied dramaturgy: the problem of exposition, the so-called “obligatory scene,” entrances and exits, even the question of why some obviously bad plays enjoy indecently long runs on Broadway. These chapters feel less like a theorist at work and more like a veteran reviewer pouring out his marginal notes.
On exposition he is especially bracing. The temptation, in lesser hands, is to dispense with background information in clumsy lumps – servants explaining the plot to each other, couples helpfully recalling their shared history for the benefit of the balcony. Egri insists that exposition should be indistinguishable from conflict. We learn who characters are, and what has happened to them before the curtain rose, only as they push and resist, threaten and conceal. A secret is never recited; it is defended, weaponized, or dragged into the light. If there is a New York Times-like sensibility in the book, it is here: a belief that information is most illuminating when revealed under pressure.
Not everything in “The Art of Dramatic Writing” ages as well as its central ideas. The examples are overwhelmingly drawn from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European drama, with the occasional venture into Greek tragedy or Shakespeare. Readers raised on “The Sopranos” or “Moonlight” may find themselves craving a bridge between Egri’s world of corseted secrets and their own more hybrid storytelling forms. His language, too, carries the assumptions of its era. Women and men, races and classes, are sometimes sketched in broad strokes that today’s readers will (rightly) interrogate. There are moments when his confidence in diagnosing “types” of people crosses the line into an unexamined determinism.
Then there is his tone. Egri does not hedge, and he does not apologize. His rules are not gentle suggestions; they are pronounced with the authority of natural law. Art, he says in effect, is dialectical – a ceaseless clash of opposing forces – and any play that fails to embody this movement is “no play at all.” For some contemporary writers, schooled in a more pluralistic critique, this rigidity will rankle. Can there be no room for the fragmentary, the episodic, the deliberately unresolved? Must every story prove something?
Yet even here the book provokes the kind of productive disagreement that strong criticism should. You do not have to become a disciple to benefit from Egri’s severity. His demand that you articulate a premise forces a useful self-scrutiny: what do you really believe about jealousy, or power, or forgiveness? His insistence on tridimensional character building challenges glib gestures toward “complexity.” His contempt for arbitrary plot twists obliges you to see whether your own climaxes are earned, or simply willed into being.
One of the quiet virtues of “The Art of Dramatic Writing” is how easily its principles migrate beyond the stage. Egri himself, in later sections, nods toward television, but the larger implications are clear. A novelist wrestling with the sprawl of a multi-character narrative can ask Egri’s questions about unity of opposites: who, in this book, truly cannot walk away? A screenwriter struggling with a second-act stall might look at the conflict-curve and realize that scenes have been static, rearranging the furniture of the premise without increasing the stakes. Even a nonfiction writer, assembling a reported essay, could learn from his emphasis on cause and effect – the insistence that events be interpreted, not merely catalogued.
What gives the book a contemporary resonance, despite its period trappings, is that it treats drama as a moral and intellectual act. For Egri, structure is not an abstract puzzle; it is an ethical responsibility. To construct a play in which people suffer and die, without understanding why they act as they do, is a kind of artistic negligence. A writer owes the audience more than sensation; they owe them an honest exploration of motive. In an age of content churn, that seriousness feels almost radical.
None of this is to say that reading Egri is effortless. The prose is dense, the analyses extended, the theatrical canon he assumes sometimes remote. A reader expecting the breezy encouragement of many modern writing guides will be disappointed. This is closer to sitting through a semester-long seminar with a formidable professor who has very little time for your excuses. But with patience, the book offers something rare: not a set of tricks, but a coherent way of thinking about dramatic action.
If one were forced, with all the arbitrariness Egri himself would deplore, to translate that experience into a number, this book’s achievement might reasonably be placed at 88 out of 100. The remaining twelve points are the price of time – the dated examples, the unexamined assumptions, the occasional dogmatism. The much larger share reflects the enduring power of its core insights: that stories are not accidents; that characters are not mannequins but organisms; that conflict, to matter, must grow logically from who people are and what they believe.
Perhaps the best measure of “The Art of Dramatic Writing” is that, seventy-odd years on, it still teaches by opposition. One finishes it not merely with a list of dos and don’ts, but with a sharpened sense of one’s own premises. Do you accept Egri’s belief that every serious work must prove a thesis? Do you share his faith in the explainability of human behavior? Do you, like him, see drama as the relentless unfolding of consequences? Whether you answer yes, no, or something in between, you come away better equipped to ask the questions that matter. And that, whatever our disagreements, is what lasting criticism – and lasting craft guidance – is supposed to do.
April 15, 2020
Although Lajos Egri gives examples through theatre plays, his ideas can be applied to all areas of the art of writing. Moreover, the book is useful for people who don't produce works of art. You can get different perspectives on analyzing a work of art. On the other hand, the book has several negative features: Egri repeats some topics more than necessary. And some of his ideas don't apply to today's art environment. According to him, if the audience finds a work of art boring, that work of art lacks proper conflict. In today's world, there are mediocre plays, movies and books that people never get bored with.
March 4, 2021
Удивительная книга, как по глубине мысли, так и по доступности изложения.
Не только новичок, но и опытный ремесленник найдет в ней надежную опору и пищу для размышлений. Выверенные советы и наблюдения чередуются тут с выдержками из знаменитых произведений прошлого. Вы узнаете, почему Шекспир, Ибсен или Софокл никогда не утратят актуальности, а созданные ими характеры были и остаются образцом высокого искусства. Автором проводится и блестяще доказывается мысль, что несмотря на ход времени - законы драматургии остаются неизменными, а значит обязательными для каждого, кто решил взяться за перо.
Книга окрыляет и одновременно предупреждает о сложности выбранного пути:
"Мы часто поражались легкости, с какой люди решают стать писателем.
Чтобы стать сапожником или плотником, нужно три года учиться в ПТУ - как же можно сразу, без серьезных занятий овладеть искусством драматургии - одним из труднейших в мире?"
Все это так. Но разве это остановит настоящего творца?
Не только новичок, но и опытный ремесленник найдет в ней надежную опору и пищу для размышлений. Выверенные советы и наблюдения чередуются тут с выдержками из знаменитых произведений прошлого. Вы узнаете, почему Шекспир, Ибсен или Софокл никогда не утратят актуальности, а созданные ими характеры были и остаются образцом высокого искусства. Автором проводится и блестяще доказывается мысль, что несмотря на ход времени - законы драматургии остаются неизменными, а значит обязательными для каждого, кто решил взяться за перо.
Книга окрыляет и одновременно предупреждает о сложности выбранного пути:
"Мы часто поражались легкости, с какой люди решают стать писателем.
Чтобы стать сапожником или плотником, нужно три года учиться в ПТУ - как же можно сразу, без серьезных занятий овладеть искусством драматургии - одним из труднейших в мире?"
Все это так. Но разве это остановит настоящего творца?
November 16, 2025
Very beneficial read. The end got maybe a too redundant for me. The playwright specific stuff wasn’t necessarily useful for me. I was most here to read the fundamentals of story writing, which is does very well.
I highly recommend this for anyone wanting to or already writing screenplays. It provides such a good road map of things you want to be aware of while writing.
— took a minute to finish reading because I paused. I was finally writing down notes from my other book.
I highly recommend this for anyone wanting to or already writing screenplays. It provides such a good road map of things you want to be aware of while writing.
— took a minute to finish reading because I paused. I was finally writing down notes from my other book.
June 20, 2018
There is some really great advice in this book for writers but the author comes off a little too pretentious at times.
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