That’s right, editors hated this man. Hated because he told the truth. Those pesky editors just had to make it hard for everyone, saying that you’ve either got talent or you’re a peanut-brained fool who should feel bad for ever trying to write something good. Lajos Egri was one of the good guys. As far as I know. He was good at teaching you how to write, anyway.

I found Egri by thinking less. I thought, why bother with Syd Field, Blake Snyder, Robert McKee. If you search for “how to write,” you will get a trillion results, some of which may be useful, but why bother sifting through all that? Go to the professionals. Go to UCLA and plunder them for their ideas.

Richard Walter and Hal Ackerman wrote their own books about writing, but both of them mentioned Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing, so skip the queue and go right for Egri.

This week, I was reading his second book, The Art of Creative Writing, which builds upon his first book, but it’s all the same thing, really. There are three key takeaways:

A premise is a sentence which summarises what your story is about. It has the format:

x leads to y

X is a value, and Y is the outcome of that. X could be Bravery, for example. What does Bravery lead to? Whatever you want pal. But it could lead to victory. Bravery leads to Victory, why not. It depends on what you want to say with the story, and you must want to say it because you actually hold that belief. No separating the art from the artist here mate.

Your X-value should be embodied in your protagonist, in this case, a brave character, who will act bravely at all costs throughout the tale.

I don’t always come up with a Premise first, but it normally follows pretty quickly behind the What If.

I gotta say, this is not new information. Craig Mazin talks about it in his How to Write A Movie episode of Scriptnotes, but he calls it a Central Dramatic Argument. Robert McKee calls it the Controlling Idea. It keeps getting renamed, but it’s been there since stories started.

Obviously. But how do you create a protagonist? How do you even create a character??

You know people. I assume. Observe them. Everyone has a mix of characteristics which interact in a thousand different ways with a million different people. You just need one. Exaggerate it, take it to the extreme, and make it the core of who they are. I know a guy who is insanely confident. His confidence is unshakeable and leads him to do all sorts of mad shit. If I take this dauntless guy and put him in charge of a tank in World War 2, that story isn’t going to end until his bravery is either rewarded or punished.

If his second-in-command is a total wet lettuce who has zero confidence, he will likely act to sabotage the confident leader for self-preservation. If you create one character, another and another will suggest themselves, so long as you have a premise shoring them up.

So you’ve got your premise and your protagonist, who presumably wants something desperately. Why can’t they walk away half way through?

Do you ever have that thought when you’re half way through a film and you think, why couldn’t the character just go home and have a bowl of Coco Pops? Your protagonist needs to be unable to extract themselves from the conflict.

I’m rewatching Better Call Saul just now and there’s an episode where dodgy lawyer Jimmy McGill tries to scam a potential client into doing business with him, but in the process has accidentally scammed the grandmother of a cartel psychopath. He acted out of guile, did not get the result he expected, and now he has to further act in order to save his skin, and the skin of his skateboarding associates. This must be a nightmare to follow if you’ve never seen the show, but that’s your fault if you haven’t.

What I’m getting at is that he cannot just abandon the quest half way. Like an eel in a net, his own actions have ensnared him, and he must find a way out.

These are just a few things that Lajos Egri goes through, and I really recommend buying the two books here and here.

This is the kind of thing I’ve been studying in the run-up to Thought Bubble 2025, where I hope to be pitching. If I’m lucky enough to be one of the dozen selected, then my pitching skills will be as good as I can make them.

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