How it works

Lajos Egri wrote How to Write a Play (1942), republished in 1946 as The Art of Dramatic Writing. His claim is that every play proves a premise, a short statement such as “great love defies even death” for Romeo and Juliet, and proves it through characters in conflict. From Hegel he borrowed the dialectic: a thesis meets its antithesis, and the clash climbs in steady transitions until the crisis and climax settle the premise.

The Point of Attack (0–8%) opens at the moment a decision forces the conflict to begin, with little ordinary world before it. Rising Conflict then carries most of the story, from 8% to 75%, as attack and counterattack climb one step at a time. The Crisis (75–82%) is the turning point where the outcome hangs in the balance, and the Climax (82–92%) is the peak where the conflict is decided. Last comes the Conclusion (92–100%), the outcome that proves the premise. A dialectic layer runs underneath, with thesis to 35%, antithesis to 80% and synthesis to the end.

Egri starts in conflict and stays there. After the opening, the only marked turn is the Crisis at 75%, right on the usual act-two break, with no midpoint along the way. Freytag’s Pyramid peaks at 50% and falls; Egri’s line keeps rising until 82%. The row credited to Hitchcock also treats a play as an argument, and Egri differs by building the argument into the characters and by caring most about the rate of escalation.

Egri’s model rewards writers who know what their story is about. A premise stated in one line, with a cause and a result as in the Romeo and Juliet example, gives every scene something to prove. In revision, it helps to mark the level of the main conflict scene by scene. Two scenes at the same level suggest a stall, and a character who leaps from calm to violence without the stages between will feel unearned.