“If you are a playwright not yet on the Pulitzer short list, or a screenwriter not yet invited to the Oscars, the best thing you can do is get to Chicago and join Will Dunne’s scriptwriting workshops at Chicago Dramatists. If you can’t do that, the next best thing is to get The Dramatic Writer’s Companion and Character, Scene, and Story and sit down to his exercises. Dunne describes clearly and succinctly how each element of drama works—each beat, each scene, each facet of character and stagecraft—and then he sets you to work to master it. The work leads wide and deep, from the hidden past to the strategies of scene, from objectives to the supernatural, from levels of desire to the pressures of conflict. Every hour’s attention to one of these mental journeys will lead you to know more, imagine better, and write more nimbly.”
— Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction and Imaginative Writing