There is no shortage of books promising to teach you how to write. Some are useful, some are needlessly complicated, and some make the whole business of storytelling sound rather more scientific than it really is.
The best writing books do not offer a magic formula. They help you understand why a story is not working, ask better questions of your characters and give you something practical to try when you have been staring at the same scene for far too long.
These eight books approach writing from different directions, covering structure, character, conflict, plot twists and adaptation. Some are firmly focused on screenwriting or playwriting, while others contain ideas that can be applied to almost any dramatic form.
If you are going to read one book about story structure, Into the Woods is an excellent place to begin.
John Yorke has spent much of his career producing and developing British television, including helping to create the BBC Writers’ Academy. Rather than simply presenting another template for a three-act screenplay, he looks at why stories across different cultures and periods repeatedly take on similar shapes.
Yorke’s central argument is that structure is not something artificially imposed on a story. It grows from the way characters pursue what they want, encounter resistance and are forced to change. He draws on everything from ancient myths to contemporary television, making this just as valuable for playwrights as it is for screenwriters.
It is intelligent without becoming impenetrable, although you may occasionally need to put it down and let a chapter settle. This is not really a book to race through. It is one to return to whenever the middle of your story starts to sag.
The Science of Storytelling begins with a deceptively simple question: why are human beings so interested in stories?
Will Storr approaches storytelling through psychology and neuroscience, examining how our brains interpret the world and why moments of change immediately attract our attention. He is particularly good on the relationship between character and worldview. We do not simply follow characters because of what happens to them. We follow them because of the particular, often flawed, way in which they understand what is happening.
The scientific angle could easily have made this rather dry, but Storr keeps it grounded in familiar stories and practical observations. It is especially useful if traditional books about acts, beats and plot points have left you feeling that you are assembling flat-pack furniture rather than writing a piece of drama.
This is a book about understanding the audience as much as understanding the writer.
First published in the 1940s, The Art of Dramatic Writing has been sitting on writers’ bookshelves for decades, and with good reason.
Lajos Egri builds his approach around three essentials: premise, character and conflict. His belief is that convincing drama begins with people rather than plot. Once you understand who your characters are, what they believe and what they are prepared to fight for, the action should follow.
Some of the language and references naturally belong to the period in which it was written, but the central ideas have aged remarkably well. Egri uses plays including A Doll’s House and Romeo and Juliet to show how character and conflict drive a story towards its conclusion.
This is particularly valuable for playwrights, but its lessons travel easily into film and television. It is direct, serious and refreshingly uninterested in shortcuts.
Plots are important, but audiences rarely remember a perfectly positioned turning point. They remember the person caught in the middle of it.
The Art of Character is a substantial guide to creating people who feel complicated, contradictory and genuinely alive. David Corbett explores desire, secrets, shame, fear, roles and the private experiences that shape how a character behaves.
Crucially, he does not treat character development as filling out a questionnaire about someone’s favourite food or childhood pet. His focus is on discovering character through pressure, conflict and action. What does this person want? What are they hiding? What happens when the version of themselves they present to the world begins to crack?
It is detailed, and probably not a book you will use from cover to cover on every project. As something to reach for when a character feels thin or overly functional, however, it is an extremely useful resource.
A good script needs more than a good idea. Screenplays: How to Write and Sell Them deals with the less glamorous work of turning that idea into a properly developed screenplay.
Craig Batty guides the reader through finding and testing ideas, building characters, shaping structure and constructing individual scenes. There are case studies, exercises and examples from both classic and contemporary films, so the advice rarely feels detached from the actual process of writing.
The book also goes beyond the final page of the script. It considers agents, competitions, networking, funding and the various ways a screenplay might help a writer begin building a career.
No book can make selling a screenplay easy, despite what some titles might suggest. This one is honest about the work involved and gives aspiring screenwriters a sensible overview of both the creative and professional sides of the craft.
Most writing guides concentrate on what happens in a story. Writing for Stage and Screen is particularly interested in what happens to the audience while they are watching it.
Sherry Kramer explores drama as an experience unfolding in real time. She considers how writers create curiosity, emotion and shifts in perception, using examples ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire and Fleabag to Pirates of the Caribbean.
That emphasis makes the book especially useful for anyone moving between theatre and screen. The two forms have obvious differences, but both depend on controlling what an audience knows, what it expects and when its understanding changes.
Kramer writes in accessible language and includes exercises developed through years of teaching playwriting. It is thoughtful and occasionally philosophical, but always connected to the practical job of making a piece of work mean something to the people experiencing it.
A plot twist should make an audience think, “Of course,” not, “Where on earth did that come from?”
Mastering Plot Twists is concerned with creating surprises that are both unexpected and properly earned. Jane K. Cleland breaks the process down into plot twists, plot reversals and moments of heightened danger, explaining how each can be placed within a story to build suspense and momentum.
Although many of its examples come from fiction, the underlying techniques apply equally well to plays and screenplays. It is useful not only for thrillers and mysteries, but for any story in which new information changes what the audience believes.
The book is practical, structured and full of exercises. If your story currently moves neatly from A to B without ever threatening to surprise anyone, this may be the one to pick up.
Adapting an existing story is sometimes mistaken for an easier form of screenwriting. After all, the characters and plot already exist. Unfortunately, so do readers’ expectations.
In The Art of Screen Adaptation, Alistair Owen speaks to an impressive group of screenwriters about the reality of bringing books and true stories to film and television. Contributors include Christopher Hampton, Andrew Davies, Nick Hornby, David Hare, Hossein Amini and Sarah Phelps.
The interview format is one of the book’s strengths. Instead of offering one fixed theory of adaptation, it reveals how different writers solve different problems. What should be kept? What can be cut? How faithful should an adaptation be? And what happens when the original author is involved?
The answers are candid, detailed and grounded in real productions. Even if you are writing something entirely original, there is a great deal to learn from hearing experienced screenwriters explain the decisions behind their work.
That depends on where you are stuck.
For story structure, begin with Into the Woods. For character, try The Art of Character or The Science of Storytelling. If you are writing specifically for film, Screenplays: How to Write and Sell Them offers the most practical starting point. Playwrights should make time for The Art of Dramatic Writing, while anyone adapting an existing work will find plenty of hard-won experience in The Art of Screen Adaptation.
Reading about writing can, of course, become an excellent way of avoiding doing any actual writing. The real value of these books comes from taking one useful idea back to the page and seeing what it unlocks.
Eventually, you do have to close the book and open the script.
