[.ca] The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative ... (ISBN 1432562185)

From Amazon.com:
For many years, Lajos Egri's highly opinionated but very enjoyable The Art of Dramatic Writing has been a well-guarded secret of playwrights, scriptwriters, and writers for television. Unlike many other books on playwrighting (several of which Egri criticizes during the course of this one), the author's systematic breakdown of the essentials for creating successful realistic plays and screenplays effectively demystifies the process of creative writing. Egri, who formulated his thoughts about "a well-made play" during its heyday (the 1940s and '50s), places a premium on an exhaustive analysis of characters and discussion of their psychological motivations. The writer is exhorted to find a premise to explore and to discover which characters will most effectively demonstrate this thesis, then is shown how most effectively to place them into conflict with each other. Conflict itself is also discussed, particularly how to create scenarios in which the crisis develops at a pace that feels unforced and natural. While Egri's view of the well-made play has little space for either the spare musings of Beckett and Pinter or the conscious excesses of non-narrative and other experimental writing, it nonetheless remains an essential text for writers drawn to realistic drama, and to any writer interested in the fundamental motivations of human behavior. --John Longenbaugh

Egri has his ups and his downs.:
Lajos Egri's book is kind of a classic, always controversial, but not always right. People who write books on making plays are always something of an odd sort; a book like Egri's also gets recommended for those who are into screenwriting, because those of us on the playwriting end are considerably sparser. In any case, Egri starts off by telling you about Premise. He's right that everything has a point. Where he starts to miss the mark is on saying that you should know exactly what the theme of your play will be, and write from there. To start a work with a Premise in mind is, frankly, to put the cart before the horse. No matter what play or screenplay you write, it will have a Premise, and Egri acknowledges this. But Egri is engaged in the worst kind of prescriptivism - start with a Premise is a formula that is theoretically designed to make you write a good play, but it's not how the plays Egri analyzes were written. He gets something else tragically close to partly right. Egri prescribes writing dialectical biographies of your characters to make them three-dimensional. He's right in that characters are primary over plot (though they're inextricable; could you really imagine a key character in a great drama outside of the play?), but writing biographies isn't how to get at them. Your audience will never see the biographies. For them, each and every character is nothing more nor less than the sum total of his or her actions on stage or film. Worry about developing them THERE. The rest is only useful if it yields some detail that can flesh them out more over time. Where Egri is good is in his analysis of movement and conflict. He's got a very good sense of everything being gradual, and really lays it out well. Don't take everything as gospel, but that is where you'll get the bang out of this book. If you need help there, it's worthwhile; if not, you don't really need to bother. No playwriting book is ever going to really get you there. It's an imprecise science, and authors are very often too prescriptivist for their own good. But there is good to be gleaned from them if you learn what you need and what works for you. Egri's book is no exception.

I wish I had read this one first:
Well, I read this book recently after reading god knows how many screenwriting books. Some of them are quite repetitive aren't they?! The thing that I've found is that there are a lot of books out there that explain the three-act structure by saying you have a set-up, then you have your turning points, your climax, your resolution blah blah blah. Thing is we all instinctively know we need this stuff in our plays and screenplays but what's hard as a writer is actually figuring out what these should be. What makes a good turning point, what makes a good resolution etc? If you want to find out, I strongly suggest you read this book. I found this book (along with Robert McKee's 'Story') the most useful out of the many (screenwriting) books I've read because he gets into the nitty gritty hard stuff. He makes you think about how important the premise is. I disagree with some of the reviews of this book on this site that say that Egri says you have to know your premise from the outset, he doesn't say that, what he does say is that you have to know it clearly at some stage in writing your script and this is true because we go to films to find something out and all the pieces have to fit together or you'll say something like 'The second half of the movie dragged', 'Why did she do that? That wasn't in character' or 'The movie tried to prove too many points all at once' and so on. The more I write scripts, the more I realise that it's all about planning and architecture because pacing is everything unlike novels etc. In particular, the most useful takeout from this book is that your premise has to match your character and story. He goes into detail using 'A Doll's House' as an example. If Nora had been a different character, the resolution wouldn't have worked as well as it did and if the story happenings weren't chosen carefully based on her character, then the story wouldn't have rung true nor would we have understood what the premise is. The other thing that I think you'll really like is the stuff on conflict, the different types of conflict and when to use a particular kind of conflict for the story you wish to tell. I'm writing a script right now and this book encouraged me to be a bit more lateral and let go of the ideas I already had because they may not be the right situation for my main character or the story as is might not be the best vehicle for arguing the premise I want to argue. Brilliant stuff! Written so long ago yet still so relevant.

great book:
There's so much more here than just the talk about premise, which for some people is what makes Egri so problematic. The sections on "Pivotal Characters" and "Unity of Opposites" and "Orchestration" are simply invaluable. Nowhere else will you find these key aspects of screenwriting addressed in such a direct, lucid and practical manner -- you can apply this stuff IMMEDIATELY to whatever story you are working on and your story will become stronger and better.

Screenwriting evolves - Egri is full of himself.:
This is probably one of the most recommended works on the subject - which doesn't make it the best. Egri is often quoted for his "...leads to ..." premise. But like Freud, whose work was very self-indulgent, though evolutionary in its time, Egri gets caught up in himself and his dictates as though carved from stone. For this reason, his material is static and closed-minded in a very dynamic field. People recommend him based on tradition or loyalty. "It's a classic, so..." A better, more in touch read is Alex Epstein's Crafty Screenwriting. He is ego-free and bottom line. He writes in a humorous, conversational style that doesn't lecture or preach. AND...He's a PROCUCED writer, so he knows how to get it done.

Lajos Egri knows the art of storytelling:
He does a wonderful job of helping the reader to understand what drama is all about. This is one of the best book on storytelling you can buy. Buy it, you won't regret the purchase.