The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri Book Review

What is your character? Are you rising in conflict? Does character require conflict? Is conflict a character requirement?

What drives a story? Is it action or character?

What is your premise? Do you understand orchestration?

Do you want to write a novel?

All the world’s a stage. My character is in question. How did I get to this climax? Why must I constantly rail against the American lie?

All essential workers are commie sellouts.

The book examines the requirements of a play.

How to write for character conflict.

How to create a premise.

How to use dialogue for attack and counter attack. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,– The ultimate dialectic of our time. And all time.

My premise is this: True love leads to heaven on earth.

There is no conflict except superficial skirmishes with weak principalities.

We use our connexion to establish a New Kingdom. We are righteous. You are beautiful. Our powers are strange and wonderful.

I have trouble with my character. I don’t know who I am. I roll with the Holy Spirit. She tells me what to do. I follow her every command.

It’s worth quoting the seven stages of man by Bill Shakespeare.
All The World’s a Stage. What part are you playing?

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

— William Shakespeare

This book carried by Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) into the court proceedings of John Landis during his Twilight Zone trial in 1987.

Dear princess, When I saw you sitting on the fat belly of Jabba the Hutt, I thought you could do better. I was just a child, now I am a man.

The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri Book Review

My annotations and highlights:

The Art of Dramatic Writing by Egri Lajos

Book last read: 2025-08-13 20:33:43
Percentage read: 100%

Chapter 1: Contents
Annotation
Chapter progress: 1.95%
Highlight: Once you read Mr. Egri’s book you will know why any novel, any movie, any play, any short story was boring, or, more important, why it was exciting.
Notes: Cool! let’s get started!

Chapter 2: Foreword
Annotation
Chapter progress: 2.51%
Highlight: If we can’t create something useful or beautiful . . . we shall certainly create something else: trouble, for instance.

Notes: Hmmm.

Chapter 2: Foreword
Annotation
Chapter progress: 2.79%
Highlight: Self-consciousness, even reclusiveness, springs from the desire to be important.
Notes: Hmmmm.

Chapter 2: Foreword
Annotation
Chapter progress: 2.79%
Highlight: Even if you will never be a genius, your enjoyment of life can still be great.
Notes: In hell.

Chapter 2: Foreword
Annotation
Chapter progress: 2.79%
Highlight: T h e greatest injustice imposed upon a mother is when her grown up children, out of sheer love and consideration, keep their troubles from her. They make her feel unimportant.
Notes: I love u mom.

Chapter 2: Foreword
Annotation
Chapter progress: 2.79%
Highlight: Joe would be surprised to learn that his craving for women is a substitute for the creation of something more significant.

Notes: Like what?

Chapter 3: Preface
Annotation
Chapter progress: 3.06%
Highlight: dialectics.
Notes: The art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.

Chapter 3: Preface
Annotation
Chapter progress: 3.62%
Highlight: From the two will be formed a synthesis, uniting both the thesis and antithesis.
Notes: Haegalian dialectic.

Chapter 4: I Premise
Annotation
Chapter progress: 7.24%
Highlight: Are they all morons?
Notes: Yes.

Chapter 4: I Premise
Annotation
Chapter progress: 7.52%
Highlight: Murder is a high price to pay for one’s ambition,
Notes: Covid extortion scam.

Chapter 4: I Premise
Annotation
Chapter progress: 8.36%
Highlight: The lack of a strong police force encourages criminals.
Notes: Proof of financial responsibility equals zero.

Chapter 4: I Premise
Annotation
Chapter progress: 8.64%
Highlight: He who digs a pit for others falls into it himself
Notes: Covid scam

Chapter 6: 1. The Bone Structure
Annotation
Chapter progress: 11.98%
Highlight: Remember that love, however ethereal, affects such physical functions as digestion and sleeping.

Notes: Dreaming of you.

Chapter 7: 2. Environment
Annotation
Chapter progress: 12.53%
Highlight: A man needs someone whom he can love and who loves him in return. So let us add love to the other requirements.

Notes: Love is requirement for happiness.

Chapter 7: 2. Environment
Annotation
Chapter progress: 12.81%
Highlight: The principle of contradiction and tension makes motion possible, and life is motion, essentially.

Notes: Life is motion.

Chapter 7: 2. Environment
Annotation
Chapter progress: 12.81%
Highlight: Our recipe now reads: health, a satisfactory position, love, and hope equal happiness.
Notes: Good recipe for happiness.

Chapter 7: 2. Environment
Annotation
Chapter progress: 13.09%
Highlight: He may or may not know that his fear is being created by a few rich industrialists who wish to cut wages and are spending fabulous sums to spread panic over the country.

Notes: Prophesy fulfilled.

Chapter 7: 2. Environment
Annotation
Chapter progress: 13.37%
Highlight: We find to our sorrow, perhaps, that even seemingly unrelated things are very much related to each other—and to
Notes: Unrelated relations.

Chapter 7: 2. Environment
Annotation
Chapter progress: 13.65%
Highlight: It can be tested by sacrifice. Real love is the capacity to endure any
Notes: I love you.

Chapter 8: 3. The Dialectical Approach
Annotation
Chapter progress: 13.93%
Highlight: These three steps—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—are the law of all movement. Everything that moves constantly negates itself. All things change toward their opposites through movement. The present becomes the past, the future becomes the present. There is nothing which does not move.
Notes: All things must pass.

Chapter 8: 3. The Dialectical Approach
Annotation
Chapter progress: 14.21%
Highlight: Man oppressed, humiliated, beaten, still professes sympathy and understanding for those who have beaten, humiliated, and oppressed him.

Notes: I love you FBI and law enforcement.

Chapter 8: 3. The Dialectical Approach
Annotation
Chapter progress: 14.21%
Highlight: twelve-year-old girl marries a fifty-year-old man—and is sincerely happy.
Notes: Hmmmm.

Chapter 9: 4. Character Growth
Annotation
Chapter progress: 17.83%
Highlight: According to science, a single thistle needs ten thousand inches of root to support a thirty-or forty-inch stem.
Notes: Wow!

Chapter 9: 4. Character Growth
Annotation
Chapter progress: 19.78%
Highlight: Growth is evolution; climax is revolution.

Notes: Study in character.

Chapter 9: 4. Character Growth
Annotation
Chapter progress: 21.17%
Highlight: What we term stupid at the last may have been a beautiful gesture at the first.
Notes: Hindsight is 20/20

Chapter 10: 5. Strength of Will and Character
Annotation
Chapter progress: 22.84%
Highlight: assessments have put him and his class out of business.
Notes: Sticker check.

Chapter 10: 5. Strength of Will and Character
Highlight
Chapter progress: 22.84%
Highlight: All the sins in the world, put together, have never made mankind into greater liars than their sweet mothers.

Chapter 11: 6. Plot or Character – Which?
Annotation
Chapter progress: 24.51%
Highlight: Milquetoast:
Notes: Bland.

Chapter 11: 6. Plot or Character – Which?
Annotation
Chapter progress: 24.79%
Highlight: What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. —EMERSON
Notes: Planting weeds.

Chapter 11: 6. Plot or Character – Which?
Highlight
Chapter progress: 24.79%
Highlight: William Archer, in his Playmaking, a Manual of Craftsmanship,

Chapter 11: 6. Plot or Character – Which?
Highlight
Chapter progress: 25.91%
Highlight: John Howard Lawson writes in his book, The Theory and Technique of Playwriting:

Chapter 13: 8. Pivotal Character
Annotation
Chapter progress: 31.2%
Highlight: A man whose fear is greater than his desire, or a man who has no great, all-consuming passion, or one who has patience and does not oppose, cannot be a pivotal character.
Notes: Protagonist.

Chapter 13: 8. Pivotal Character
Annotation
Chapter progress: 32.87%
Highlight: Necessity forces a liberty loving person to try to destroy his oppressor or die, rather than submit to slavery.
Notes: I will never submit to unlawful sticker checks.

Chapter 13: 8. Pivotal Character
Annotation
Chapter progress: 33.15%
Highlight: He has not only harnessed the elements but is on the verge of conquering disease with the new drugs which are constantly being discovered.

Notes: Covid vaccine gave everybody aids.

Chapter 16: 11. Unity of Opposites
Annotation
Chapter progress: 35.93%
Highlight: they were subject to the desires of those who decided to solve their economic problem with war.
Notes: Essential workers.

Chapter 19: 2. Cause and Effect
Annotation
Chapter progress: 38.72%
Highlight: You cannot stop thinking of the girl, of what she must think of you, of whether you dare call her up, of the impossibility of your ever seeing her again.
Notes: Hi. How are you?

Chapter 19: 2. Cause and Effect
Annotation
Chapter progress: 40.67%
Highlight: Every manifestation of life, from birth to death, is conflict.
Notes: Born to die.

Chapter 20: 3. Static
Annotation
Chapter progress: 42.9%
Highlight: Can we say that only the sun is responsible for rain?
Of course not. There can be no rain without the oceans and other factors.
Notes: Fact check.

Chapter 21: 4. Jumping
Annotation
Chapter progress: 44.57%
Highlight: The author must not write in a vacuum to show characters who live in one.
Notes: Static characters.

Chapter 21: 4. Jumping
Highlight
Chapter progress: 45.4%
Highlight: Read Good Hope by Heijermans, and see how a ship thus goes under and human tragedy reaches a new height.

Chapter 21: 4. Jumping
Annotation
Chapter progress: 46.8%
Highlight: Whenever a conflict lags, rises jerkily, stops, or jumps, look to your premise. Is it clear cut? Is it active? Remedy any fault here, and then turn to your characters. Perhaps your protagonist is too weak to carry the burden of the play (bad orchestration). Perhaps some of your characters are not growing constantly. Don’t forget that staticness is the direct result of a static character who cannot make up his mind.
Notes: The premise is true love leads to heaven on earth.

Chapter 21: 4. Jumping
Annotation
Chapter progress: 48.19%
Highlight: It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.

Notes: FBI

Chapter 21: 4. Jumping
Annotation
Chapter progress: 48.75%
Highlight: I find it impossible to convince myself that the law is right.
Notes: The law is wrong.

Chapter 23: 6. Movement
Annotation
Chapter progress: 51.53%
Highlight: The drama is not the image of life, but the essence.
Notes: Drama is the essence of life. Fact check.

Chapter 23: 6. Movement
Highlight
Chapter progress: 52.65%
Highlight: The conflict has to go on.

Chapter 24: 7. Foreshadowing Conflict
Annotation
Chapter progress: 55.15%
Highlight: Conflict is the heartbeat of all writing. No conflict ever existed without first foreshadowing itself. Conflict is that titanic atomic energy whereby one explosion creates a chain of explosions.
Notes: No. I won’t wear a goddamned face mask.

Chapter 24: 7. Foreshadowing Conflict
Annotation
Chapter progress: 55.43%
Highlight: There never was a night without a twilight; a morning without a dawn; a winter without an autumn; a summer without a spring first;
Notes: Good lyric.

Chapter 24: 7. Foreshadowing Conflict
Annotation
Chapter progress: 55.43%
Highlight: Without conflict life would not be possible on earth, or, for that matter, anywhere in the universe.
Notes: Go to hell.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 56.27%
Highlight: 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.
Notes: I will never comply.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 56.27%
Highlight: In conflict we are forced to reveal ourselves. It seems that self-revelation of others or ourselves holds a fatal fascination for everyone.

Notes: Essential workers are much more dangerous than the jews.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 56.82%
Highlight: Determined foes, under no circumstances, can or will compromise. One must destroy the other in order to live.
Notes: You can’t make me wear a face mask.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 57.1%
Highlight: It is pointless to write about a person who doesn’t know what he wants, or wants something only halfheartedly.
Notes: I want you.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 57.1%
Highlight: What makes a character start a chain of events which might destroy him or help him to succeed? There is only one answer: necessity. There must be something at stake—something pressingly important.
Notes: FBI at door for rejecting covid narrative.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 57.66%
Highlight: Faust, by Goethe, starts when Faust sells his soul to Lucifer.

Notes: Shall we return to Goethe?

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 58.5%
Highlight: no character can reveal himself without conflict—and no conflict matters
Notes: The conflict of character.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 58.5%
Highlight: If a man tells a woman he loves her, they can continue in that vein for hours and days. But if he says “Let’s elope,” it may be the beginning of a play.

Notes: Lets elope.

Chapter 25: 8. Point of Attack
Annotation
Chapter progress: 58.77%
Highlight: A play should start with the first line uttered.
Notes: I want you.

Chapter 26: 9. Transition
Annotation
Chapter progress: 60.45%
Highlight: Two or three billion years ago, the earth was a ball of fire, revolving around its own axis.
Notes: Lol

Chapter 26: 9. Transition
Annotation
Chapter progress: 68.25%
Highlight: Every tissue, every muscle and bone in our bodies, is re-juvenated every seven years. Our attitude and outlook on life, our hopes and dreams are also constantly changing. This transformation is so imperceptible that usually we are not even aware that it is taking place in our bodies and in our minds.
Notes: Transformation.

Chapter 27: 10. Crisis, Climax, Resolution
Annotation
Chapter progress: 72.7%
Highlight: Crisis: a state of things in which a decisive change one way or the other is impending.
Notes: Crisis capitalism.

Chapter 32: 4. Experimentation
Annotation
Chapter progress: 78.83%
Highlight: It is interesting to know that stars are born as men are: the attraction of opposites brings forth a nebulous form of matter which will evolve if conditions are favorable.

Notes: You are a star.

Chapter 34: 6. Entrances and Exits
Annotation
Chapter progress: 79.94%
Highlight: Compton, declared that actino-uranium, if completely converted into energy, would yield two hundred and thirty-five billion volts per atom.
Notes: Actino uranium.

Chapter 40: 12. How to get Ideas
Annotation
Chapter progress: 84.68%
Highlight: Whenever you have a fully rounded character who wants something very badly, you have a play. You don’t need to think about situations. This militant character creates his own situations.

Notes: my name is Peter.

Chapter 40: 12. How to get Ideas
Annotation
Chapter progress: 85.79%
Highlight: The secret of happiness is the understanding that no one is perfect; we must always realize that there is room for improvement
Notes: I want you to be happy.

Chapter 41: 13. Writing for Television
Annotation
Chapter progress: 86.91%
Highlight: new and exciting medium,
Notes: Check copywrite date.

Chapter 45: 2. Ghosts
Annotation
Chapter progress: 89.97%
Highlight: Mr. Manders, the priest, comes to consult her on whether they should insure the building. To do so would be to imply that they have no faith in God;
Notes: Insurance is a godless scam.