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 behaviour - and to develop his dramatic conflict on the basis of that behaviour. 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.

拉约什·埃格里（Lajos Egri，1888－1967）生于原奥匈帝国的埃格（今匈牙利境内），十岁就写出了一部三幕剧。1908年，埃格里移民美国。一战期间，他加入纽约的左派戏剧组织，成为导演和剧作家，后于20世纪30年代创立写作学校。埃格里同时也是一位新闻工作者，并曾撰写过电视剧本。

高远， 2004年毕业于北京电影学院，获硕士学位，现为专职编剧，作品有电视剧《大汉口》等。