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You Are Here: creation process: writing: scriptwriting books: The Art of dramatic Writing
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The Art of dramatic Writing
author:Lajos Egri
price: $9.60
BUY IT ON AMAZON.COM |
Amid the hundreds of "how-to" books that have appeared in recent years, there have been very few which attempted to analyze the mysteries of play-construction. This book does that -- and its principles are so valid that they apply equally well to the short story, novel and screenplay.
Lajos Egri examines a play from the inside out, starting with the heart of any drama: its characters. For it is people -- their private natures and their inter-relationships -- that move a story and give it life. All good dramatic writing depends upon an understanding of human motives. Why do people act as they do? What forces transform a coward into a hero, a hero into a coward? What is it that Romeo does early in Shakespeare's play that makes his later suicide seem inevitable? Why must Nora leave her husband at the end of A Doll's House?
These are a few of the fascinating problems which Egri analyzes. He shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise -- a thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behavior -- and to develop his dramatic conflict on the basis of that behavior. Premise, character, conflict: this is Egri's ABC. His book is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in a literary creation.
I would have given this book a 10, except it didn't write my plays for me, I still had to do the work. Egri is clear, uses wonderful examples, and gets to the heart of the matter in a way that helps lesser concerns solve themselves as you find the threads of what your script is about and orchestrate your characters to best story advantage. Recommended to script writers, and to folks who just want a better understanding of whats going on up there on that stage.
I'm glad so many other readers enjoyed this book as much as I did. Concepts about how to make a story work that have escaped me up to now are made blazingly clear in one exciting example after another, and have given me focus and direction in my works-in-progress. This will make my own work more readable, which is, after all, what communication through the written word is all about. I am truly appreciative of a job well done. My ambition is to be as clear and articulate as Lajos Egri shows it can be done.
Egri has so much practical information to offer -- premise, character analysis, the art *and* the craft of dramatic writing. If you want an excellent distillation of all that works in dramatic writing, buy this one.
Reviews excerpted from: Amazon.com |
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